What You Need to Know About the Coronavirus

Supply chains and retail workers have been relentlessly bombarded by panicked shoppers hoarding in anticipation of quarantines and closures. Unless you live in a remote area with few stores, a few boxes of pasta and a can or two of soup in the pantry is a more-than-sufficient stockpile for any impending lockdown. In the meantime, here are plenty of other best practices to protect yourself from contracting and spreading the coronavirus, including cleaning your phone, not touching your face, and avoiding travel. Crucially, these suggestions do not include panicking:

No matter how worried you are, there are people who are more worried. Look out for them, and help make sure everyone takes these basic measures and doesn’t panic. Societies break down when people fear one another as simply bipedal distributors of infectious agents. See people as allies in this unique moment of uncertainty.

Nor do they include buying up all the hand sanitizer you can get your hands on and price-gouging it online, as some Craigslist sellers have been doing. Our reporter Kaitlyn Tiffany spoke with several such sellers to understand their motivations, and found that on the whole, they’re not sorry for their actions.

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   What Will You Do If You Start Coughing? by James Hamblin

Preparation and protection are important, but it’s also crucial to know what steps you can take if you start to feel ill. In an ideal outbreak scenario, reliable testing would be available to all, but America’s already-strained public-health system has left many with less serious symptoms waiting for a test for days on end. For now, the most common recommendation is temporary self-isolation—a choice that’s going to be difficult for workers and caretakers to make without community or government assistance. One idea supported by some economists is that “everyone receive cash, immediately.”

People need to feel able to skip work and still make rent and feed their family. They need cash without strings attached, and they need it now, not via a complex omnibus economic stimulus package next month … A pandemic is like a slow-motion hurricane that will hit the entire world. If the same amount of rain and wind is to hit us in any scenario, better to have it come over the course of a day than an hour. People will suffer either way, but spreading the damage out will allow as many people as possible to care for one another.

Haley Weiss is a former editorial fellow at The Atlantic.