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It's good to wash your hands and wipe down surfaces, and in a future outbreak that might be your first choice for staying safe. But when it comes to preventing COVID, if you have to choose between spending time and money on cleaning things or improving airflow, improve the airflow. Social distancing works, but there's nothing magical about six feet. <~?~Insert art 023_Gate_9780593534489_art_r1> <~?~NO CAPTION FOR THIS ILLUSTRATION (Illustration showing how confusing social distancing can be. This example suggests a distance of 28 tennis balls between people.)> By now, I've lost count of how many signs I've seen reminding me to stay six feet away from others. My favorite is the one at the club where I play tennis, which hilariously explains that six feet is the width of twenty-eight tennis balls. Who on earth is so tennis-oriented that they understand twenty-eight tennis ball widths better than they understand six feet? If you get too close, do they say, "Hey, you're only nineteen tennis balls away, please step back nine more?" I guess that if such people exist, you'll find them at a tennis court. But I play a lot of tennis and I have no clue what twenty-eight tennis balls looks like. In any event, there's nothing magical about the six-foot rule (or the twenty-eight-tennisballs rule). The WHO and many other countries recommend distancing of 1 meter, or about 3 feet. Others recommend 1.5 to 2 meters, which is around 61⁄2 feet. In truth, there is not some stark cutoff where you're at high risk of getting COVID within a certain distance and zero risk beyond that distance. There's a continuum of risk, and it depends on the specific situation you're in: how big the droplets you're exposed to are, whether you're