Staying at home for months is an onerous thing to ask of people, but what it means is easy enough to understand: Unless necessary to keep your job or keep yourself alive, you just don’t leave. When American mayors and governors began asking people to shelter in place to combat the coronavirus pandemic, the United States, a country generally stewing in deep political acrimony, was unusually united in doing what was asked.
Stay-at-home orders were implemented for many reasons: to stop the virus from silently spreading between people, to prevent the collapse of hospital systems, to allow public-health officials to build up testing capacity, to hire contact tracers to snuff out hot spots before they became full-fledged outbreaks. But at the most basic level, shutdowns bought some time for scientists faced with a novel pathogen to figure out what the hell was going on in the first place. How does the virus spread? What determines how sick someone gets?
Full answers to those questions are still being determined, but preliminary research on outbreaks across the globe has provided some important clues about which behaviors and activities matter most for coronavirus transmission. Taken together, they create a rough sketch of risk and reward that can help people shake off mounting quarantine fatigue. These little bits of scientific relief have arrived just in time: Summer is here, and more states are starting to reopen, forcing people to figure out their own methods of risk assessment in their daily lives.
Public-health experts now have to determine how to deliver the message of moderation in real time, and hope that ..
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