system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
If everyone in the world self-isolated for a month, would we eliminate the common cold, the flu, and other communicable diseases?

Imagine if someone everyone complied with an order to have no contact with anyone else for a month. How would diseases like the cold and the flu (and probably many others I'm not aware of) persist?
gpt
You need to factor in the incubation period (time between contact and showing symptoms), length of active illness, and infectivity period - for some illnesses you can shed the virus for long after you are no longer symptomatic. Plus some viruses can hang around on surfaces for a long time too. It would probably have to be more like 3 months, but yes in principle you'd get rid of a lot of infectious diseases, but only those that *only* replicate in humans. Which isn't all that many, as a lot also infect animals. Birds are the biggest reservoir for influenza, which also infects pigs, for example. Bats also carry a lot of viruses that don't make them very sick, but do make humans sick.