 Ideally, once you become infected, you would be safely quarantined away from your family in a so-called fever clinic, dedicated facility designed to assess, test, treat, and triage patients so you wouldn't put the people you live with at risk. Fever clinics were one of the strategies used to bring the outbreak in China under control by preventing clusters of family infections. In lieu of such innovations, the best choices try to recover at home, isolated as much as possible from your housemates. Preferably, you should avoid contact with both people and pets and be cordoned off in a sick room with a separate bathroom if possible. Can pets get the disease? In rare cases, dogs have been found infected with the new coronavirus, but the virus replicates poorly in canines. They don't seem to get sick, and they don't appear to pass the virus along to others. This is consistent with what we saw in SARS, where a small number of pets tested positive, but they didn't appear able to infect others. The COVID-19 virus has been shown to reproduce efficiently in cats, however, who are then able to experimentally transmit the virus to other cats in separate cages, presumably via respiratory droplets, even though they made themselves not become sick. A survey of 102 cats in Wuhan province after the outbreak found evidence of infection in 15 of them, presumed as with the pet dogs, to be cases of human-to-animal transmission. In the United States, the first confirmed case of animal infection was a second tiger at the Bronx Zoo, followed by a few pet cats. There is no evidence to date that pets have been a source of infection of COVID-19 for humans, but rather we suspect it's the other way around. To reduce the risk of spreading the disease to those you live with, if you are sick, cover your nose and mouth with a tissue when you cough or sneeze, throw the used tissue in a lined trash can, and then immediately sanitize your hands. Don't share personal household items, such as eating utensils, towels or bedding. Wash your hands often. Routinely disinfect all high-touch objects such as phones, doorknobs and toilet surfaces in your sick room and bathroom yourself and if someone else clean and disinfect the rest of the house, if possible. Harvard public health experts suggest running the exhaust fan in the bathroom. Opening the windows in the sick room to enhance ventilation may also help. During the SARS outbreak, hospital wards with larger ventilation windows appeared to harbor significantly lower infection risk for healthcare workers. And finally, based on surrogate coronaviruses, using a humidifier if the air is dry may also cut down on the viral circulation. Most people who contract COVID-19 spontaneously recover without the need for medical intervention. If you do come down with it, protect those around you, get rest, stay hydrated, and monitor your symptoms. If serious problems arise, such as difficulty breathing or persistent pain or pressure in the chest, seek medical attention. But notify the 911 operator that you may have the virus or if less serious, call your doctor or emergency room first before heading in since it may have special instructions for suspect cases in your area. The CDC advises that once your symptoms start getting better, once you've been fever-free for three full days off of fever-reducing medications, and it's been at least a full week since your symptoms first started, then you can start relaxing your home isolation. The World Health Organization is more conservative, however, recommending self-quarantine for a full 14 days for anyone with symptoms or anyone living with anyone with symptoms. If you're sick and you must be in the same room with someone else, you should wear a face mask. That's what masks were originally designed for, so-called source control, rather than self-protection. They're meant to protect others from you, rather than you from others. Common cold coronaviruses, as well as flu and rhinoviruses, can be detected in exhaled breath, not just coughing and sneezing. And surgical masks can cut down on the amount of virus you exhale out into the world. We have yet to know if this is true of COVID-19, but the head of the Stanley Committee on Emerging Infectious Diseases at the National Academy of Sciences told the White House, currently available research supports the possibility that SARS-CoV-2 could be spread via bio aerosols generated directly by patients' exhalation. This shouldn't be surprising. After all, respiratory droplets are not just sneezed gobs of mucus. When your breath fogs, when you're outside on a really cold day, that's an illustration of respiratory droplets. That plume of vapor coming out of your mouth is made up of tiny droplets of water straight from your lungs. On a warm day, you can imagine yourself breathing out that same cloud, you just can't see it. Air on the side of caution and assume the virus is in the breath. If infected individuals are exhaling virus before they even know they have it, maybe everyone should be covering their face in public. The CDC initially resisted such a measure. A decision the Director General, the Chinese CDC, referred to as a big mistake. The US CDC relented in April, recommending wearing cloth face coverings in public settings, where other social distancing measures are difficult to maintain, such as grocery stores or pharmacies. The 180-degree shift is probably best exemplified by the US Surgeon General's swing from tweeting, seriously people, stop buying masks, all caps, exclamation point, to being featured in a video weeks later, demonstrating how to improvise masks out of a bandana and rubber bands. The CDC has easy no-sew instructions at bit.ly-cdc-d-i-y. In addition, for those who are sick and necessarily exposed to others, surgical masks are advised when disinfecting a residence that may have been exposed to the virus. You should also wear disposable gloves, open all the windows while mopping the floor and cleaning all surfaces with a disinfectant solution, and washing all linens in the clothes you just wore, cleaning with detergent. Make sure to hold soiled linens away from your body and don't shake them before they're washed. And as always, take care to not touch your eyes, nose, and mouth when removing your mask and carefully wash your hands afterwards. You can find all these instructions at bit.ly-cdc-cd-c-d-i-y. The suggestion that the public should not wear masks because health care workers need them more is definitely valid up to a point. It's surely an argument for manufacturing more masks, not denying them to populations who could potentially benefit from them. Until such masks are available on sufficient numbers, though, frequently washed cloth masks are recommended by the CDC. I'll talk about what the best materials to use for them is, as well as the role of N95 respirators next.