Cities and states around the country are practicing self-isolation or sheltering in place. Nonessential businesses around the US have closed their doors. Streets are empty nationwide.

If you’ve been to the grocery store in the last week or so, you know it can be an extremely chaotic experience amid the coronavirus pandemic. Clerks are running around doing their best to restock as customers are literally climbing into freezers to reach the last pack of frozen berries shoved in the very back of the top shelf. People are swarming the canned goods sections and those preoccupied with crossing items off their lists are temporarily breaking the rule of 6-foot social distancing in order to get their hands on the ripest bananas.

Public health officials consistently promote hand-washing as a way for people to protect themselves from the COVID-19 coronavirus. However, this virus can live on metal and plastic for days, so simply adjusting your eyeglasses with unwashed hands may be enough to infect yourself. Thus, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization have been telling people to stop touching their faces.

Public health officials consistently promote hand-washing as a way for people to protect themselves from the COVID-19 coronavirus. However, this virus can live on metal and plastic for days, so simply adjusting your eyeglasses with unwashed hands may be enough to infect yourself. Thus, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization have been telling people to stop touching their faces.

As the COVID-19 pandemic spreads, people have been asked to stay out of public spaces and reduce interpersonal contact to limit the transmission of the virus. This process has the unfortunate name of “social distancing,“ which has connotations of removing oneself socially and emotionally as well as physically from the public sphere. Before modern communication technologies existed, those might have been unfortunate side effects of such a containment strategy. However, with all the methods available to us to stay connected across large gaps between us, I propose we call this effort social spacing.

The San Francisco Bay Area woke up Tuesday to an order of “shelter in place.”

Amid the COVID-19 global pandemic and recommendations to practice “social distancing,” a growing number of people have taken themselves off public transit and out of cabs and ride-hailing cars and gotten onto bicycles.

In order to dramatically flatten the exponential Covid-19 growth curve provisional social disruptions need to take place all across the globe.

Demand for electricity is beginning to weaken in parts of the U.S. hardest hit by the coronavirus and could fall further in coming days as shelter-in-place orders spread, following a path taken by Italy’s industrial region.