Bix dot Blog

The second point I was trying to make is: quarantine and social isolation are actually collaboration in this world; by staying home, you’re not just hiding from the menace, you’re actively participating in misaligning one element of this complex system, so as to interfere with the progress of the infection. So this idea somehow that a citizen could actually play a part that was as important as a vaccine, but instead of preventing transmission of the virus into another cell at the ACE receptor level, it’s preventing transmission of the virus at the social network level. So we’re actually adopting a kind of behavioral vaccine policy, by voluntarily or otherwise self-isolating. I think it’s a very important point for everyone to understand, and I actually argued in that article that everyone should be awarded some fraction of the Nobel Prize in Medicine for the sacrifices they’re making in order to minimize the transmission.

—David Krakauer, in “Rigorous Uncertainty: Science During COVID-19 with David Krakauer”