In a time where the world is seemingly in chaos and the reality of a global pandemic reigns overhead, it can be extremely stressful to manage daily life. Whether you are worried about how things may change during these times, or you are worried about how you will be able to protect yourself and others, the best thing that you can do for yourself in this situation is to ask how COVID-19 spread and how to protect ourself from it? Knowing how to protect yourself and others may bring you some degree of comfort, knowing that you are doing everything in your power to keep your family safe.

First things first, it is going to be important for you to understand what COVID-19 is and how it spreads from person to person. Once you understand a little bit more about the virus, you will have a better idea of how you will be able to keep yourself and others safe from it as well.

  1.Understand What the Virus Is

Knowing what the COVID-19 virus is may help you have a better idea of how to handle the situation, and it may bring you some peace among many people who are panicking over the global pandemic status that this virus has achieved. COVID-19 is the name given to the particular strain of coronavirus that started an outbreak in 2019. Coronavirus is a type of virus that is named for its distinctive shape, and it is more often found in animals, although there are strains that can transfer between humans and animals.

Coronaviruses, including COVID-19 are primarily respiratory-related viruses and are closely related to the viruses that caused the SARS and MERS outbreaks. What makes COVID-19 particularly notable is both the mortality rate in elderly and vulnerable patients and the fact that it can lay asymptomatic for up to two weeks, meaning that people who are infected have a high chance of infecting others before they begin noticing the symptoms. Because of this, it becomes all the more important for you to understand how COVID-19 spreads and what measures you can take to prevent it from affecting people you know and care about.

  2.Know How the Virus Spreads

Now that you know a little bit more about COVID-19, you should now begin to focus on understanding how this particular virus spreads and what you can potentially do to stop it. Viruses can pass on to others in many different ways, such as through bodily fluids, contact, or just by being in the same proximity as someone who is infected. COVID-19 is a virus that spreads through respiratory droplets. That is to say, it spreads when people cough or sneeze near others.

Because of the nature of this virus, symptoms may not appear until up to two weeks after you are first infected. But just because you are asymptomatic doesn’t mean that you won’t spread it to other people. People who are infected but asymptomatic can still spread the virus to other people by coughing, sneezing, or getting respiratory droplets near another person one way or another. This means that COVID-19 can quickly and easily spread, which it has done and why it has created a global pandemic.

  3.Self-Isolation Is the Key

Because people can be asymptomatic for a period of time before they feel the symptoms of COVID-19, it becomes even more important for you to practice self-isolation. Self-isolation is going to be key in protecting yourself from getting COVID-19, and it will be key in making sure that you do not infect anyone who may be vulnerable as well. Self-isolation is about as simple as it sounds.

All you really have to focus on doing is making sure that you minimize the amount of time that you go outside and interact with other people. Some examples of how you can do this include relying on online shopping, pickups, and deliveries more often, working from home if you can, and giving up some recreational activities until it is safer.

When you are practicing self-isolation, there may be a time when you need to go outside and interact with others, such as needing to make a run to the store for important household goods. If you end up doing this, you need to remember that you should try and stay farther away from other people.

This will help ensure that if someone does cough or sneeze, the water droplets will not be able to reach you, reducing your chances of picking up an infection. The Center for Disease Control (CDC) recommends that you stay about six feet apart from other people at all times. In addition to this, you will want to make sure that you are wearing a face mask to further protect yourself and others.

4.  Protect Yourself and Others with Masks

It is an inevitable fact that you are going to need to go to the store or go to work at one point or another. When this happens, you will want to do what you can to ensure that you are keeping yourself and others safe. The best way to do this is with face masks.

However, you cannot just use any face masks and hope for the best. You will want to specifically look for face masks that are made from cloth, or another approved material, that can prevent the transmission of bodily fluids from coughing or sneezing. The best masks you will want to look for include 95 masks and disposable medical masks.

The importance of these masks comes from the fact that, even when you are out in public, there’s a good chance that you may feel the urge to cough, sneeze, or even sniffle. There’s also a very good chance you may touch your face after doing any one of these actions.

Then, after you have touched your face, you are going to touch something else with that same hand. This is how COVID-19, and a plethora of other diseases, are spread. By having a physical object, such as a face mask, cover your mouth and nose, you will have a far lesser chance of accidentally infecting someone else because you had to sneeze or because you touched your face at the wrong time.

  5.Disinfect What You Touch, If You Can

Finally, on the chance that you do end up touching your face at some point throughout the day, you will want to do what you can to disinfect the places that you touched the most. A good example of this is disinfecting the handle of a shopping cart after a grocery haul. However, purchasing disinfectant wipes can be expensive and difficult to carry around. Thankfully, there are other, more transportable ways that you can disinfect any surfaces you touch.

For example, you can consider carrying around a UV disinfection wand and a UV disinfection box. These UV disinfection tools, as you may be able to imagine, rely on UV light to disinfect viruses and bacteria, and potentially even COVID-19. These products are generally accessible, easy to use, and do not take up a lot of room. They can also be far more effective for certain surfaces than disinfectant wipes can be.

If you want to make sure that you are keeping yourself safe when you are facing a global pandemic, these are some of the top five things that you can consider doing to make the most out of the situation.