In the study of infectious diseases, social distancing is defined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (2020) as a set of “methods for reducing frequency and closeness of contact between people in order to decrease the risk of transmission of disease”. It is the dominant way in which we use our intuition to reduce the risk of contact by keeping ourselves apart from one another, and it is most important in situations where most of those around us are not particularly familiar with one another and where the infection in those populations is largely unknown. Wherever there is danger of infectious disease, this is the usual strategy adopted, and in the modern era, since the late 19th century if not before, this has been the preferred mode of behaviour until a vaccine or related preventive drug treatments are discovered. Most of these strategies however are targeted at the very small scale, keeping people apart from one another at short distances, usually more than 1 to 2 metres. In situations where we have little knowledge about how a virus might spread, most of the instruments we use to control infection operate at this finest scale. When it comes to scaling these ideas up, to deal with clusters of buildings, neighbourhoods, districts, entire towns and so on, our ideas are much more flimsy and we have very few tried and trusted strategies for suppressing the virus and reducing infections at these higher levels. By and large, what we know about behaviour patterns at these larger scales and what the best kinds of behaviour might be to avoid the diseases, is largely an open book with advice about distancing and travelling largely based on our intuition and what we observe, but often superficially and only at the smaller of scales.

中文翻译：

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大规模的社会疏离

在传染病研究中，疾病控制与预防中心（2020）将社会疏远定义为“减少人与人之间的接触频率和亲密关系以减少疾病传播风险的方法”。这是我们运用直觉来使自己彼此远离以降低接触风险的一种主要方式，并且在我们周围大多数人彼此之间并不特别熟悉并且感染受到感染的情况下，这是最重要的。这些人口基本上是未知的。在存在传染病危险的任何地方，这都是通常采用的策略，并且在现代时代，自19世纪末（如果不是更早）开始，在发现疫苗或相关预防药物治疗之前，这一直是首选的行为方式。但是，大多数这些策略都是针对很小的规模，使人们之间的距离很短，通常超过1至2米。在我们对病毒如何传播知之甚少的情况下，我们用来控制感染的大多数工具都以这种最佳规模运行。当涉及到将这些想法扩大规模以应对建筑物，街区，地区，整个城镇等的集群时，我们的想法更加脆弱，我们几乎没有经过实践检验且值得信赖的策略来抑制病毒和减少感染更高的水平。总的来说，我们对这些较大规模的行为模式了解多少，最好的行为方式是避免疾病，