Ross: We need to get enthusiastic about social distancing

There are indications that the isolation strategy is working.

A company that sells internet-linked thermometers reports that across the country the number of fevers has dropped. That seems to indicate we have achieved a level of mutual avoidance that is reducing new infections of all kinds.

I believe we can thank the nation’s governors for that. I watch their briefings. They have learned a whole new kind of motivational rhetoric – a rhetoric that seeks to instill a passion for inactivity.

Speeches that push you to levels of social avoidance you never dreamed you could achieve – so that even if you didn’t go anywhere at all today, you will go there even less tomorrow.

And no one does this better than New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy.

“Remember we are New Jersey — we gotta crush that curve even further,” he said recently. “We gotta stay home. Stay away from each other. Do the little things. And we will do this!”

He is determined that when the history of this era is written, New Jersey will be remembered as the state that stayed home better than any other state.

If we’re going to get through this, the rest of us have to catch his enthusiasm and show the same determination to never stop stopping what we’re doing, and to never rest until we are totally resting.

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