How the Idea of Social Distancing Began

Like an old coat social distancing has become a familiar, well- worn term, if still not a comfortable one ever since the pandemic.

But the peculiar phrase’s origins are interesting, it is quite the bizarre tale beginning some time ago, all the way back in the year 2006 with a school- girl’s science project.

The first time some people probably heard anything about social distancing was in the 2011 film, Contagion, but it made its debut before then in the New York Times in February 12, 2006.

It was in an article referring to the Avian flu with the words nothing other than a politically correct term for quarantine.

The concern at the time was the strain would lead to a pandemic with President George Bush requesting submissions from ‘experts’ in his administration for a strategy on the way forward.

There was resistance to the idea of social distancing with it viewed as impractical and politically infeasible then came the surprising detour.

A daughter of a scientist working at Sandia laboratory was busy with a high school project that delved deeply into the 1918 Spanish flu epidemic, her name was Laura Glass, and she recently declined to be interviewed when this bit of deep history was uncovered by the Albuquerque Journal.

Laura, with some guidance from her dad, devised a computer simulation that showed how people — family members, co-workers, students in schools, people in social situations — interact.

What she discovered was that school kids encounter about 140 people a day, more than any other group.

Based on that finding, her program showed that in a hypothetical town of 10,000 people, 5,000 would be infected during a pandemic if no measures were taken, but only 500 would be infected if the schools were closed.

Laura’s name appears in the foundational paper titled; Targeted Social Distancing Designs for Pandemic Influenza (2006) where she argues for lock downs and forced human separations.

An excerpt reads; Implementation of social distancing strategies is challenging. They likely must be imposed for the duration of the local epidemic and possibly until a strain-specific vaccine is developed and distributed. If compliance with the strategy is high over this period, an epidemic within a community can be averted. However, if neighboring communities do not also use these interventions, infected neighbors will continue to introduce influenza and prolong the local epidemic, albeit at a depressed level more easily accommodated by healthcare systems.

Without further ado a high school experiment became the law of the land.

The question is how did this idea manage to prevail against opposing views?

The Bush administration sided with the proponents of social distancing and shutdowns, so this was essentially about politics, not science, these ideas becoming the basis for government planning throughout the globe and used extensively in simulations to prepare for pandemics.

One proponent of this method said, we always knew this would be applied in worst-case scenarios, even when you are working on dystopian concepts, you always hope it will never be used.

And it has, but ideas especially have consequences.

Lock-downs are the new orthodoxy but that doesn’t make it medically sound or morally correct.

At least we know that many doctors and scholars in 2006 did their best to stop this nightmare from unfolding, though unfortunately they were unsuccessful. .