'Pause, reflect and stay home': how to look after yourself and others in self-isolation

If you are not already self-isolating, or considering it, there is a high chance you will be in the coming months. The government’s advice is that people who live alone and have a fever or a continuous cough should be completely isolated for seven days, while 14 days of “whole household isolation” is recommended where anyone has those symptoms. This means not even going out for a walk or opening the door to receive a delivery directly.

This extreme state is ringed by the equally novel and perhaps more poorly understood concept of “social distancing”. At its most basic, this means trying to drastically reduce the amount of contact you have with other people, especially if you are 70 or older. If your average day features 1,000 interactions – public transport, the office, the shops, the pub, the cinema – then reducing that to 500 interactions will have a material effect on your chances of contracting the coronavirus and on the speed of transmission overall.

It sounds simple, but both concepts throw up multiple practical follow-up questions – to which the answers are often unclear. Prof Tom Jefferson, a British epidemiologist based in Rome with the medical research group Cochrane, is an expert in . He says that we may have to tolerate this lack of clarity. “There is no certainty in science,”