Max Minute: What Are The Best Social Distancing Practices?
By Dr. Max Gomez
NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) -- Many people have been asking about social distancing -- what practices work best and why, and how does it apply to hot spots?
Stay six feet apart.
That's what we're told is the minimum separation distance if you have to be out and around other people, but there's actually nothing magic about six feet.
It's considered to be the farthest that coronavirus-laden droplets can travel when an infected person coughs or sneezes.
Are you safer at ten feet because some sneezes can travel farther? Probably. All of this is playing the odds.
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What we're talking about is the chances of getting infected by breathing in corona-loaded droplets. The odds go up, of course, if you live in or are passing through coronavirus hot spots, like the ones the city health department has identified on a map.
But realize that the odds of getting infected also depends on the dose of the virus. One viral particle is highly unlikely to cause disease. In fact, it might take many tens of thousands.
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So if you're walking around a hot spot neighborhood -- wearing a mask and gloves, of course, and staying at least six feet away from anyone else -- the chances of breathing in enough virus, even in a hot spot, are very low. But you must not touch your face, even with gloves, and you must wash your gloves first, then your hands when you get home.
As for driving in a hot spot neighborhood, the chances that someone would cough or sneeze and you would just then pass through that droplet cloud, and then those droplets would make their way through the air intake of your car -- because your windows are up, of course -- and doesn't get caught in the filter of your A/C system, and then you breathing that in... Well, as the epidemiologists say, those odds are vanishingly small.
You're more likely to be struck by lightning.
For the top questions people have been asking about the coronavirus, visit cbsnewyork.com/max, and go to facebook.com/cbsnewyork to submit your question.