Uncontrolled Spread: Why COVID-19 Crushed Us and How We Can Defeat the Next Pandemic

by Scott Gottlieb

That requirement for six feet of distance was particular to the US. The WHO recommended one meter, or 3.3 feet.38 China, France, Denmark, and Hong Kong went with one meter. South Korea opted for 1.4 meters; Germany, Italy, and Australia for 1.5 meters.39 (The European CDC continued to recommend maintaining physical distance of ideally two meters.)40 Even the CDC’s decision in the spring to revise the recommendation from six to three feet seemed arbitrary. While the CDC published some accompanying studies to support the move, it wasn’t any better established that the science had firmed around the new requirement. I was told by one HHS official that the revised three-foot number was based on an experiment that the CDC had shared with the senior leadership of HHS in the fall, six months earlier, showing that two people who were masked and standing three feet apart reduced spread by more than 70 percent. If that experiment formed some of the basis for the change in the recommendation, it begs the question, why did it take the CDC six months to issue the revised guidelines?