Random morbid fact: Drowning is the #1 cause of accidental deaths in toddlers. Truth is, I’m not doing my job as a pediatrician if I don’t communicate this to parents at well visits. But it’s not a mic drop as I leave the room. We talk about what that means and how to go about life with a toddler that IS going to be around water from time to time.
Here is the advice I give. When you bring your toddler to an event (lake, pool, birthday party with a pond in the back yard), just ask yourself the question: what will keep my child from wandering into that water without me knowing it. Then we talk strategy. Maybe it’s a locked gate, lifeguard, or a rotating ‘water-watcher’ responsible adult. But if you asked yourself that question, congratulations, you are a water-safety conscientious parent. Enjoy your water-vicinity event!
There’s a parallel here to the advice I’m giving to families about what it means to social distance during the COVID19 pandemic.
Quick disclaimer: I’m not a public health expert. But I did marry one, which is good on me.
Here’s what she, and others public health gurus (here is a great podcast from a friend of mine, Dr. Jim Hamblin MD MPH, now writer for the Atlantic) are saying:
Social distancing is NOT social isolation.
Social distancing is making a conscientious effort to limit the spread of illness.
As Dr. Hamblin states in his podcast:
“A bad thing is happening and we are going to have losses, people are going to die, and the choices before us are to minimize that damage and help each other out the best we can. We need to balance keeping people healthy and keeping society, our economy, going. We need to be realistic about that. We can’t all just stay inside forever (that would be the safest strategy), and we also can’t be living the way were before.”
To me, this effort is individual and very cumulative.
Here is a graph published by the Journal of American Medical Association (JAMA).
It forecast the virus in the current COVID warzone of Lombardi, Italy. .
Here we see two lines depicting two potential patterns of COVID spread, in terms of the real danger, ICU admissions. Notice they are both increasing. That’s not up for debate.
The take home? We need to keep this thing linear. Viruses want to spread exponentially. They are good at that, and I see this in my clinic every year at the beginning of school. For these two-weeks I’ll see tons of kids with viral illnesses. What happened? A virus went from one snotty kid in school, to another, and they infected two more, and they cumulatively infected 10 more. You get how this spreads right?
That snotty kid is out there folks, and he’s gonna get some of us. But we can keep the spread linear if we make some changes.
Luckily, the government and organizations are taking a lot of our social-activity choices out of our hands. Schools, concerts, sporting events, large public gatherings are cancelled. President Trump took the wise step to declare a state of emergency to free up dollars and loosen restrictions to aid public health efforts (The tacit benefit is a leader showing his country to take this seriously).
So, now we are left with choices to make on an individual level. What are the rules?
Rule #1: forget thinking about rules. My advice is to make conscientious efforts, similar to my pool safety spiel. If you do that, I really think we are doing our part to keep this thing linear.
One example is my daughter’s birthday party. We have been planning a big Minnie Mouse party for Margaret. Should we cancel?
We did not. We made a conscientious effort to change our plan to limit spread and exposure. We invited her two best friends (cousins!) and told the other kids to take a hike. With a little hand sanitizing from time to time we had a great time. Margaret sure did.
We can do this! Yes, we will have some choices and sacrifices to make, and honestly, we all know that not everyone is doing this well (check out the Vegas strip). You can’t control that, so don’t worry about it. But little things matter, and your individual efforts will have an exponential impact.