Silence filled the classroom as an 11-year-old student, Tijani, described escaping from a shooter in his neighborhood a year earlier. "I felt like my heart was exploding from my chest." I was leading a workshop for 7th graders, and as Tijani told us his story, his breathing grew faster and his hands began to shake — physical signs of trauma. Gun violence traumatizes our youth. Adverse childhood experiences like witnessing a shooting can literally change young people's brains and even make them more likely to harm others, thereby spreading their trauma to someone else. So, when scientists tell us gun violence moves across people and populations like a virus, they're being quite literal. The understanding that gun violence is a public-health issue is not new. But what is new and worth exploring is the fact that 2020 gave us the template for what it looks like when we take a public-health crisis seriously. It's one thing to declare gun violence a grave threat to our collective well being. It's another thing to treat it like one. The COVID-19 pandemic, in real time, is giving us the blueprint for how to address a public-health disaster. It's time to treat gun violence like COVID-19. Perhaps even more mind-blowing than coronavirus' exponential growth last year was how swiftly and effectively our state and our region slowed its spread. By some metrics, Washington state and King County handled the pandemic better than anywhere else in the U.S. So, what are the lessons learned from the pandemic and how can we apply these strategies to stop the spread of gun violence? First and foremost, our region and state's COVID-19 response has been incredibly comprehensive, and its scope has reached far beyond medicine. Our gun-violence response must be similarly broad. For example, just like we quickly established housing for COVID-positive individuals to isolate and quarantine, we should quickly establish optional housing for people at risk for gun violence, away from their neighborhoods, until the risk of spread declines. When people are involved in heated disputes in their neighborhoods, or live with their abusers, it is often unsafe for them to remain in place because those situations may escalate due to proximity. Having more options for distanced, temporary, safe housing could be a mitigating strategy for the spread of violence. Similar to community vaccination clinics, we should also fully invest in community-resource centers for groups whose lives have been or could be upended by shootings.