Expert: We Could Beat Coronavirus With A 5-Week Lockdown

We've been told that COVID-19 is highly contagious, and we've seen this first hand with increased outbreaks worldwide, and total cases in many cases doubling in large cities like New York.

But one expert who has a history combating infectious diseases thinks we can end the spread with a nationwide 5-week lockdown.

Yaneer Bar-Yam is a physicist and pandemic expert  and he came up with the strategy that helped stop the spread of Ebola in West Africa in 2014. USA Today ran an opinion piece from him where states the 'fastest and even the only way' to contain coronavirus in the U.S. would be a five-week national lockdown. He says that closing down schools, movie theaters, and bars are a good start. But while some people are social distancing, not everyone's taking it seriously enough.

So to stop the virus, we'd need everyone to stay home except for food, medical supplies, and work that's required to keep society going.  We'd need to ban travel.  And the government would have to step in to give aid to people who can't make money.

He says that if we were to do that, by the fifth week, the number of people getting the virus would be a SMALL FRACTION of what they are now. Plus, the lockdown would give us time to scale up our number of tests, process them, and start properly quarantining people with the virus.

And while a five-week lockdown would have MAJOR ramifications for the economy and our way of life without it, the number of cases is just going to keep going up exponentially and our medical system will not be able to handle it.

(Read more online from USA Today)