Tips on daily epidemic prevention
1. When you leave your home, wear gloves—winter mittens or outdoor gloves—and keep them on in subways, buses, and public spaces.
If you are in a social situation where you should remove your gloves, perhaps to shake hands or dine, do not touch your face or eyes, no matter how much something itches. Keep your hands away from contact with your face. And before you put your gloves back on, wash your hands thoroughly with soap and warm water, scrubbing the fingers. Put your gloves on.
2. Inside your household, remove all of the towels from your bathrooms and kitchen immediately, and replace them with clean towels that have the names of each family member on them. Instruct everybody in your home to only use their own towels and never touch another family member's. Wash all towels twice a week. Damp towels provide terrific homes for viruses, like common colds, flus, and, yes, coronaviruses.
3. Be careful with doorknobs. If it's possible to open and close doors using your elbows or shoulders, do so. Wear gloves to turn a doorknob—or wash your hands after touching it. If anybody in your home takes sick, wash your doorknobs regularly. Similarly, be cautious with stairway banisters, desktops, cell phones, toys, laptops—any objects that are hand-held.
As long as you handle only your own personal objects, you will be ok—but if you need to pick up someone else's cell phone or cooking tools or use someone else's computer keyboard, be mindful of not touching your face and wash your hands immediately after touching the object.
4. If you share meals, do not use your personal chopsticks and utensils to remove food from a serving bowl or plate and, of course, tell your children to never drink out of anybody else's cups or from a container of shared fluid. Place serving spoons in each dish and instruct everybody at the table to scoop what they want from the serving dishes onto their personal plates or bowls, return the serving spoon to the main dish, and then use their personal chopsticks only to pick food from their personal plate or bowl into their mouth.
Wash all food and kitchenware thoroughly between meals and avoid restaurants that have poor hygiene practices.
5. When the weather allows, open your windows at home or work, letting your space air out. The virus cannot linger in a well-ventilated space. But of course, if it is cold or the weather is inclement, keep warm and close those windows.