What is "social" about social distancing?

Roger Kimball writes in Spectator USA,

Not for the first time, I have been to led to wonder why a practice that is so patently antisocial should have been baptized ‘social distancing’. What’s social about it?

‘But a couple of weeks ago you said there would only be hundreds of deaths.’ Yes, I did. I got that wrong, but just how wrong is not clear. Dr. John Lee, writing in The Spectator, made the important point that there is ‘a big difference between COVID-19 causing death, and COVID-19 being found in someone who died of other causes’. Indeed. It is one thing to die from the effects of the coronavirus, quite another to die with the virus. If you are 87 and ailing and are infected, your chances are not good. But who’s to say whether you died from the virus or that congestive heart failure you’d been battling all these years?

...Let me be clear. The CCP virus is a nasty bug. People should exercise caution. They should wash their hands frequently, etc. If they are in one of the few hot spots — New York City above all — they should be especially careful. But remember, 2.8 million people die every year in the US. The seasonal flu hospitalizes hundreds of thousands every year and kills anywhere up to 80,000. Overall deaths this season are actually down because of the coronavirus: people are not out and about as much, so fewer have died. In one sense, then, it has been a lifesaver. The panic surrounding it, on the contrary, has been a lethal assault. It’s too soon to say what the fatality rate of our insane overreaction will be. It will be many months, maybe years, before the tally of lives blighted, as well as lives ended, can be toted up.

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