COVID-19 is everywhere in the United States, but the alarm over the virus isn’t equally distributed yet. The San Francisco Bay Area is in its third week of shelter-in-place rules. California and New York are in their second (though New York prefers to call its rules “NYS On Pause.” As of Monday, 31 states had announced similar rules, and the situation keeps on changing.

Not much in this country’s approach to COVID-19 is consistent. Some schools are closed until April; some are closed until May; some are still open. Interpretations of what “social distancing” might mean vary widely. For the past few weeks, every time I’ve visited the grocery store, there have been new precautions: Now only a small number of customers are allowed inside, people line up outside six feet apart, and every shopping cart is sprayed with sanitizer and wiped down before it’s passed to the next person. Other stores in the neighborhood do no such thing. The other day, biking down the street, I saw two pedestrians edge around each other on the sidewalk, careful to maintain the WHO-recommended six feet of distance, only to be sideswiped by a couple of sweaty joggers, who seemed unaware that there was even a pandemic going on.

This is a nervous state to be in, but in the absence of a coherent national policy (or even coherent social norms), what we do have is science, even if much of it is still a work in progress. Here’s what the scientists are telling us about mitigating these new risks we’re all facing.

Masks can’t protect you completely, but even the cheap kind will probably protect you (and the people around you) more than no mask at all.

The scientific consensus is, increasingly, contradicting the advice given by the US surgeon general, the CDC, and WHO, all of which advised that people should only wear masks in public if they feel mild cold or flu symptoms. “Seriously people,” wrote Jerome M. Adams, the surgeon general, on Twitter, on the last day of February. “STOP BUYING MASKS! They are NOT effective in preventing the general public from catching #Coronavirus, but if health-care providers can’t get them to care for sick patients, it puts them and our communities at risk!”

This was strange advice to give, considering the existing science, and may have backfired and caused people to hoard them, since Adams didn’t bother to distinguish between the kind of simple masks that people can make at home and the N95 masks that were already in desperately short supply. Even very-low-tech face masks provide more protection than no mask at all, as long as people are careful to avoid touching them and transferring the virus or bacteria to the mask itself. While there are many factors influencing these numbers, so far during the COVID-19 pandemic, countries in which mask-wearing in public spaces is widely practiced have shown lower infection rates.

The reason for this, which is too horrible to ever be unlearned once you have learned it, is that a surprising amount of being a living, breathing human involves inhaling other people’s spit fog. Under most circumstances, it’s kind of unavoidable. But you definitely want to do your best to avoid this during a pandemic.

As Roxanne Khamsi recently explained in Wired, when public health officials described COVID-19 as mostly being transmitted via surfaces and not being an “airborne” virus, they were using a very specific technical definition of the term. COVID-19 is carried by relatively large droplets of moisture, so—unlike some viruses—it can’t hover in the air and infect people 30 minutes after someone coughed it out into the world. But large droplets can still be carried by the air and into your face. Out of 60 people who attended a choir practice on March 10 in Washington’s Skagit Valley, 45 developed coronavirus symptoms, despite washing their hands diligently and taking what were then considered appropriate precautions for avoiding transmission of the virus.

In the US, wearing a mask is often interpreted as “I am a sick person out in public, exposing everyone to my germs.” Especially in the early weeks of the epidemic’s arrival in the United States, some frontline workers at clinics and hospitals and grocery stores who come into contact with large numbers of people were told not to wear masks to work, on the grounds that it makes customers or patients uncomfortable.

In countries that have adopted mask-wearing in the last few decades as a public health practice, wearing one is more of a friendly gesture—a way of signaling that you are a thoughtful person who is looking out for the health of the people around you. Since COVID-19 can be spread by people who don’t feel sick yet (or never show symptoms), wearing a face mask and feeling no shame to do so would reduce the spread of the virus, the same way that proper handwashing does.

Handwashing with soap and water is better than using hand sanitizer. 

When the COVID-19 virus leaves someone’s body in search of new hosts, it’s wrapped in a protective blob of mucus, like a tiny spacesuit. Washing your hands properly with soap and water makes short work of the mucus—without it, the virus is fragile and easily destroyed. Achieving a similar effect with hand sanitizer takes more like four minutes. Sanitizer is good for situations when you don’t have any other options, but if you have access to soap and water, use it.

Act like you’re already infected and you don’t want to pass the virus on to anyone else. Act like you’re not infected and everyone is trying to pass the virus on to you.

We now know that COVID-19 can be transmitted several days before people actually begin to show symptoms (and for quite a while longer if they are asymptomatic). We also know that if we could just freeze everyone around the world in place for 14 days while sitting six feet apart, the whole epidemic would stop—with no nearby human hosts to make more of itself, the virus would die out on every surface. 

We can’t practically do that—there are sick people who need to be taken care of, crops that need to be tended to, food and other necessities that need to be distributed. But the closer we can get to the freeze tag ideal of pandemic management in the next critical weeks, the smaller and more manageable it becomes. Now is not the time to go camping with your other quarantined friends or otherwise get creative with the definition of what quarantine means. You are a big, beautiful ecosystem that quite likely has been colonized by an invasive species at this point—and you should treat yourself with the same level of ecological caution.

Take care of yourself and others.

Being perfectly healthy is not going to protect you completely from COVID-19, but since the current evidence shows that people with pre-existing health issues struggle more to fend off the virus, there’s no harm, and plenty of potential benefit, in keeping yourself as healthy as possible during the quarantine. Don’t drink (or drink very rarely), don’t smoke, don’t vape, eat your vegetables (clean them well and cook them first unless you absolutely trust their source) and whole grains, and especially make sure that you get enough sleep, since sleep plays a significant role in how well your body can fend off infectious diseases.

Another thing that science tells us: It’s not easy to change your habits. But COVID-19 is changing our habits whether we like it or not. Over the next few weeks, very few of us will be living life as we are accustomed to living it—in that space of disruption, there’s room for new habits to form.