We have a potent weapon against coronavirus and should use it promptly

The devious coronavirus is exploiting our species.

Our propensity to gather has enabled the contagious virus — which can produce no symptoms for days — to easily travel from person to person. We've gifted the bug something it doesn't naturally have.

"It has legs," said Mark Cameron, an immunologist at Case Western Reserve University. "It has legs and wings."

The new coronavirus — resulting in the respiratory disease COVID-19, which is 10times more lethalthan the flu — is now a global pandemic, though it's people over 60 who are most vulnerable. And it's just getting started.

Unlike some scary infectious diseases, like SARS, MERS, or Ebola, this new coronavirus doesn't take people out quickly. In fact, around 80 percent of us only experience mild symptoms or no symptoms at all. People might not even know they're sick for some five days. "That person is flying, walking, and interacting," said Cameron, one of the scientists who contained the 2003 SARS outbreak in Canada. "They're spreading the virus without realizing they’re sick."

But we can take away the virus' legs. It's a simple, effective weapon. It's called "social distancing." That means staying at least three feet awayfrom people, or avoiding gatherings and crowds.

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Social distancing is all the more critical because a vaccine — like we so fortunately have for the flu, smallpox, and polio — is at least a year away, explained Cameron.

To slow the virus down, basic public health measures, particularly social distancing, are the only option we have today.

"It takes an unprecedented public health response to put a lid on this one," Cameron emphasized.

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Universities around the nation, at Harvard, NYU, UCLA, and beyond, are already employing significant social distancing responses by only holding classes online.

"Social distancing goes a long way to prevent the rapid spread of the virus," Akiko Iwasaki, a professor of immunobiology at the Yale School of Medicine, told Mashable.

"Social distancing is one of the most effective tools," agreed Suzanne Willard, a global health expert at Rutgers School of Nursing.

Washing your hands, too, is absolutely imperative to avoid infecting yourself or others with coronavirus. It won't, however, stop you from breathing or coughing near someone, or picking up airborne respiratory droplets from a coworker. But social distancing — if your work and life allows — will avoid a rapid spread.

This will buy society time to develop medications to suppress the disease in our most sick and vulnerable, explained Yale's Iwasaki. And, eventually, more time will give us a year or so to test a vaccine.

Unlike this coronavirus, SARS and MERS didn't have the chance to become a pandemic. They were too vicious. They hospitalized people too rapidly. "SARS and MERS burned themselves out," said Cameron. "You could find them, and identify them." "People were very sick, very quickly."

Not so with coronavirus.

So far, seven members of Congress have announced self-quarantines after having come in contact with infected people. While infected, we can stroll around ignorant that we're carriers.

The SARS outbreak started in January 2003, recalled Cameron. It was quashed by mid-May. "It went away really quickly," he said.

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Meanwhile, coronavirus, first identified in Wuhan, China, in December 2019, is still ramping up. In the U.S., we don't even have a grip on the number of infections yet, because testing has been woefully inadequate. But one thing is certain: "We expect this to spread," said Jason Farley, a nurse practitioner for the Division of Infectious Diseases AIDS Service at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.

So avoiding gatherings, crowded trains, crowded bars, and packed shows is necessary to take away the virus' edge. Especially because the virus probably won't slow down in the warmer spring and summer months. As a general rule, the influenza virus likes to spread in colder, drier weather, so it peters out during summer.

But coronavirus may live on, undeterred by summer. "We have no evidence that coronavirus will follow that rule," said Cameron.

We've all got to swallow the bitter pill, then, and promptly alter our lifestyles. If not, we'll continue to give this bug legs.