Read: Cancel everything

The big problem with the phrase social distancing is that it’s going through an acute case of concept creep: Does it mean you can still head off to work in the morning and invite a friend over for dinner? Or does it mean you have to be holed up at home until further notice? “Social distancing is such a malleable term—malleable in the mouths of officials and in the minds of their audience,” Peter Sandman, a risk-communication consultant, told me. “To some, social distancing means try not to hang out in crowded places unless you really really want to. To others, it means stay completely isolated no matter what.” (The Atlantic has a guide to what public-health experts say you should and shouldn’t do under social distancing here.)

And the more capacious definition doesn’t cut it anymore. “Just [doing] social distancing may delay some cases,” says Julie Fischer, a microbiologist at Georgetown University. “But those measures are not entirely going to stop the spread of the epidemic.”

When Dowd studied how the coronavirus spread across Italy, she found that one reason the outbreak there has proved so utterly disastrous is because of young people traveling between their jobs in big cities and their older relatives’ homes. It’s common for young adults working in Milan to live with their family in nearby villages and commute into the city—which ultimately made them big conduits of the disease to their elderly and more vulnerable relatives. “It helped to bring the initial transmission that might have come into Milan from abroad out to these communities with a high percentage of older people,” she told me.

A lockdown can feel eerily draconian or downright authoritarian, and implementing a countrywide shelter-in-place mandate in the United States would be a legal quagmire. So rather than waiting to see if the federal, state, and local governments demand it, Americans should take on the onus of holing themselves up at home.

Yes, being in lockdown quite frankly sucks. One week in, and I’m already sick of Netflix. Pasta and beans get old very quickly. Shifting between rooms doesn’t do much to keep away the cabin fever. But every person who goes a little crazy stuck at home is saving an untold number of lives.

This is especially true if you live somewhere that isn’t yet in full on crisis mode. “Even if you’re in a city that doesn’t have a lot of infections, you should still be taking these type of measures,” says William Hanage, a Harvard University epidemiologist. “This is early on. If [we] manage to stop infections happening now, [we’re] going to be saving hundreds of thousands of people down the line.”

In places that have already been hard-hit by the coronavirus, early lockdowns have been successful in tamping down the outbreak. Hanage told me that while the Chinese cities of Wuhan and Guangzhou both put in place strict controls on movement, Guangzhou had far fewer cases when it did so, and was able to keep infection rates significantly more manageable.