Every day we continue to hear new numbers and statistics. It's hard to escape the daily updates. Believe it or not, we have only truly been making moves to counter the spread of the virus for about two weeks. It's been a long and devastating two weeks for many Americans.

Right now, the biggest challenge for the United States is medical needs. Both supplies and space/beds for those that are battling COVID-19.

For many, the hardest part of practicing social distancing is not knowing how long we are going to have lock ourselves in our house and how much toilet paper we will actually need.

Moving forward, it's important for our country to take every step to control this pandemic.

Many believe we must apply the Wuhan-style containment of a full shut down.

This is what happened when they made the extreme but effective decision on January 23:

Wuhan-style Containment:

    • Goal: Fully and permanently contain disease until vaccine is developed
    • Duration: 2 months (8 weeks)
    • Measures: Treat everyone as infected. Forced community-wide home quarantine, full shutdown of all businesses, closed borders, active monitoring, full population-wide mandatory testing and aggressive quarantine. Public aid relief bill. 
    • After-effects: Once ended, long-term implementation of border quarantines (14 days), active monitoring, and potential for repeat of measures above to ensure containment.

This was outlined by Max Anderson, VP at General Motors, and as you can see it took two months to come full circle.

While a few states have implemented full containment except for essential personnel, the country as a whole would need to act together to get the best results.

How is Massachusetts looking as far as its containment effort? Governor Baker's decision to close all non-essential businesses beginning tomorrow at noon will certainly help. We found a website that makes some honest predictions of when we may have this pandemic under control based on how quickly we take action. The graph you find on this page is just the state of Massachusetts.  Keep in mind this is an estimate and this is still a very fluid situation that is changing every day.

For me, something like this gives me hope and hopefully will give us the motivation to act fast and hunker down. If we do act fast and take this seriously, we can possibly get back to some kind of normalcy by summer.

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