Social distancing is the action of intentionally maintaining a distance of at least 6 feet between one's self and other humans for the purpose of flattening the curve of COVID-19 infections and thereby mitigating the effect of hospital and intensive care unit beds not being available to those who may need them due to overwhelming of the medical system with more sick patients than there are resources to care for them.
SARS-CoV-2 or the 2019 Novel Coronavirus is a new to humans virus, hense novel with an exponential growth rate potential because zero humans are immune to it. Every time a potential infection is stopped by social distancing the doubling of the infection rate slows. If it can be slowed enough it may be that the number of COVID-19 cases will spread out over time enough to not have such devastating effects as triaging of medical resources in developed areas of the world.