Giving Compass' Take:

• The U.S. needs to prepare for infection numbers to increase, despite there being lockdowns throughout U.S. cities.

• How can we start to support workers and families that are forced to stay home during this crisis?

• Understand the research on whether or not warmer weather will slow the coronavirus. 

Now that many parts of the US have shut down temporarily to combat the coronavirus, our greatest enemy is our own impatience.

The measures taken in California last week and 15 other states since then hurt. They kill off businesses that were critical to the livelihoods of millions of people. They throw millions of Americans out of work and off their health insurance.

And for the next two weeks, it won’t even be clear if they’re doing anything.

“We have sacrificed so much already, but it feels like nothing is working. That’s because it takes weeks to see results. We must stay committed and trust that the social distancing we are enduring now will save thousands of lives,” Dr. Caitlin Rivers at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security wrote Monday.

Here’s why it will take so long for our sacrifices to have visible effects. The thing we’re trying to reduce — new coronavirus infections — is invisible at first. It takes between 2 and 14 days for a newly infected person to start showing symptoms. After symptoms begin to show, it can take more than a week for them to be eligible for testing (many people are not eligible at all). And then, thanks to backlogs in testing availability, it can take days for them to learn they tested positive.

As a result, every positive test today reflects infections that occurred, on average, a few weeks ago. And it will be a few weeks from now before we see new case numbers start to fall if our lockdown measures today are successful.

In other words, once you shut down your city to fight the virus, you should actually expect things to get worse before they get better. And because of that, there’s a very real risk that that will discourage us and prompt us to give up. We shouldn’t.

Read the full article about how coronavirus lockdowns work by Kelsey Piper at Vox.