Where to worry about coronavirus!

Each virus has its unique pattern of spread, and scientists are starting to get a handle on how the novel coronavirus behaves. This understanding is making it possible to rank the risks of different activities from high to low to trivial.
The most informative studies show how the disease is spreading in the real world — a big advance over the various simulations and models that, early on, showed only hypothetical scenarios.
The two drivers of the spread of the disease are close contact and crowding in closed spaces, said Muge Cevik, a virologist at the University of St. Andrews in the UK. It spread through homeless shelters and nursing and care homes, where people were crowded with many others. It spread through people’s households, and through meat packing plants.
Cevik has been collecting and reviewing papers from around the world on disease transmission. “There are some trends emerging,” she says. “Spending time dining together, being in public transport,” might risk spreading the disease, but “going to a market briefly, for five minutes or a transient encounter while you walk or run past someone, those are low risks.”
The studies come from China, Singapore, Taiwan, and to a lesser extent the US. They were all done through contact tracing, which may turn out to be humanity’s greatest strategy for fighting the Covid-19 pandemic.
Contact tracing can stop chains of transmission, even after a disease is widespread, as physician and former World Bank president Jim Yong Kim explained in The New Yorker. Another major benefit is that it offers clues as to how the disease spreads. Each virus has its unique pattern. The US
has done almost no contact
tracing yet.
A survey of people coming to hospitals in New York City in May revealed that most of them had been home, and were not working or taking public transport.

—Bloomberg