History is full of bad years. 536, for example: a nonstop catastrophe. An Icelandic volcano erupts, coating the entire northern hemisphere in ash, and ushering in the coldest decade on record. The ash dims the sun. There is no summer that year, and so the crops fail, leading to famine in Ireland, Scandinavia, Mesopotamia, China. The situation does not improve. A few years later, the Plague of Justinian threatens much of the world’s population. 

Or 1348: legendarily terrible! The Black Death sweeps through Europe, eventually killing roughly 40 percent of the continent’s population. People go to funerals and die on their way home, an endless cycle of death. The economy collapses. The world reverberates with a sense of despair. 

1837 is an American bloodbath; 1918 sees a deadly flu pandemic and a brutal world war; 1968 is defined by two crushing assassinations at home and devastating carnage abroad. And that is only the West. If you want to be grim about it, what is history, really, but the study of very bad years?

In this context, 2020 is probably not the worst year, compared to all of human history. If your metric is, well, did a quarter of the global population die of plague? Then the answer is no. This is reassuring, I guess, if you’re a real glass-half-full kind of person, which I am not. How could I be? It’s 2020.

The year has become an incantation. It is a running meme. It may not, in fact, be the worst, but it is momentous. It began with hellish wildfires in Australia, which would soon be mirrored by unprecedented wildfires in California, and then a deadly respiratory virus upended life as we’d known it, and everyone you knew was a potential vector of contagion, and the police kept killing Black people, and the president of the United States refused to commit to a peaceful transition of power, and people kept dying. Meanwhile, there was much talk of “murder hornets.” 

A trickle-down theory of crisis emerged: When a beloved Virginia Christmas display went dark, that was “because 2020.” It is the reason a bandana-wearing iguana attacked a man in Florida, the reason Covid-19 mutated, the reason that there were so many hurricanes that we ran out of names, the reason pumpkin spice hard seltzer exists. 

It is perversely thrilling to be living through history. “We are living through history!” I keep thinking, inanely, as though we aren’t always, as though “history” were a discrete event, like the MTV Movie Awards, or the Tour de France. 

In mid-March, a few days after New York City had settled into eerie silence, I was walking the dog when I saw a big yellow street sign that said “End.” Under that, someone had added, in duct tape, the word “Times.” Seems reasonable, I thought. 

It was cold and gray in Brooklyn, and a mysterious disease had begun killing large numbers of people at random. I didn’t think it was the End, in any cosmic sense — just as history trundled along after 536 or 1348, I generally assume that time will continue to heave itself forward — but for the first time, it felt plausible. How would anyone know?

My understanding of the apocalypse, based on Hollywood and a tenuous grasp of the Book of Revelation, is that there would be signs first. Were these not signs? If it turned out this was it, who would say they had not seen it coming?  

There was evidence everywhere; the whole year felt like evidence, although evidence of what remained less clear. The death toll in the US surpassed 300,000 in December and only continues to rise, but people have started getting the vaccine. The president has yet to concede the election, but the Supreme Court has upheld the results. On a good day, it is possible to feel something like hope. 

But lately, hope is delicate. We have become acutely aware that existence is fragile, that a future is not promised; individually and collectively, the whole project seems pretty touch-and-go. Why not a pandemic, a depression, a famine, a blanket of ash? The Dark Ages happened to someone; why not us? 

“It does seem to me that this is the year that the enlightenment discourse about progress finally died,” says Timothy Burke, a professor of history at Swarthmore College. “You can put it in the ground and put a daisy on its grave. I don’t hear anyone out there anymore who says the future has to be brighter and better.”

The lesson of 2020 is not that we’re doomed, necessarily, only that doom feels like a legitimate possibility.

This should not be surprising, given that we have been warned for centuries, by all kinds of people, only some of whom were leaders of fringe cults. Others, though, were historians, seismologists, climate scientists, archaeologists, and epidemiologists, who were not forecasting the End, in a Biblical sense, but simply suggesting that we were not, in fact, too modern to fail. Are we failing? I wanted to know. Is this what failure was supposed to look like? 

I called astrologers: Had they seen this coming? Was the year as catastrophic as it felt? I asked historians. I turned to theologians who study apocalyptic texts; I talked to preppers, figuring that people bracing for disaster might know how to recognize it early. All of them, I hoped, might be able to explain something I couldn’t, which is: What was 2020, and what happens now?

Coby Coonradt and Cameron Hardy live in Utah near the Colorado border, which was once a hub of dinosaur activity and is now a hub of bones. Together, they co-host the Casual Preppers Podcast, which is also how they classify themselves: Just because you have a 25-year food supply in your basement doesn’t mean you can’t also be a regular dude with a family and a job. 

“A lot of people hear ‘prepper’ and immediately think of the NatGeo series, Doomsday Preppers,” Coonradt tells me, but that’s not them. “Our goal is to try and get rid of that stigma.”

When they met, in 2014, they realized they were both into “survival, or the apocalypse,” Coonradt says, “So we decided to get a little bit more into it. That’s when we said, hey, let’s start a podcast. Let’s talk about this stuff. This is too much fun.” The show vacillates between the extreme and the extremely practical. In the last four years, they have covered fires, bunkers, polar bears, the logistics of prepping with a family, guns, gardening, bartering, smartphones, aliens, and World War III. 

It is, for them, a hobby — a “mindset,” Hardy says. “It just feels like a manly thing, to be prepared, to be self-sustaining, be able to take care of your family in the event of a disaster without relying on other people or the government.” Part of disaster preparedness is that you never know exactly what the disaster is going to be, or on what scale. “One of our biggest things is preparing for your own personal apocalypse,” says Coonradt, meaning that you want a plan for biowarfare, but also for what happens if your car breaks down.

I want to understand what part of this is fun. One thing I like to do for fun is take long walks to places that sell novel sandwiches. One thing Coonradt and Hardy like to do is imagine circumstances that many people will not survive.   

“It’s almost a comfort to talk about these things,” explains Coonradt, “because the more you talk about them, the more you work them out.”

Certainly, they’d been worried about pandemics, but in an abstract way. Back in 2018, they’d done an episode about them. “Several times, we’ve said our biggest fear, of all the different types of scenarios, is a pandemic, because of how fast and how devastating it can be,” says Hardy. But as Coonradt will tell you, bracing for the possibility of something is not the same as expecting it. “I think I actually said, at one point during that initial craziness, ‘I really liked prepping better when it was a hobby!’ ”

Prepping put them ahead in some ways, but in others, they were just like everybody else. They had N95 masks already. They did not have yeast. Mostly, prepping shaped their attitude: It was bad, but they’d been expecting even worse.

“Could have been worse” is their general take on 2020. The election did not spark the violence they’d anticipated. “The outcome was about as good as we could hope for,” Coonradt says, quickly clarifying that doesn’t mean politically. Although, he adds, he doesn’t not mean politically. Politically, they try to stay neutral. Preppers “tend to lean to the right of the aisle,” but over the course of the Trump years, that’s started to change. “We have seen a lot of people from the left coming into prepping,” he says brightly. 

It is nice to see that people agree on something, I suppose, even if the thing that they agree on is the possibility of societal collapse.

When I’d thought about the End before, which I tried not to, I’d imagined it would be definitive. The way I pictured it, drawn mainly from disaster movies I have not seen, is that there would be an apocalyptic event, asteroid, maybe, or an ice age — I didn’t dwell on details — and then that would be it. 

This, Kyle Lambelet, a professor at Emory’s Candler School of Theology, suggests gently, is perhaps not the most useful way to think about it. “Apocalypse” comes from the Greek word “apokaluptein” — to uncover or disclose. “So rather than asking whether this is the end, I think it’s more interesting to ask what’s being revealed here,” he explains. “And the things I think are being revealed are that we’re vulnerable to each other. That we share breath with one another, and when that breath becomes diseased, we can do harm to one another.” But it has also revealed that while we all may be vulnerable, “we’re not all vulnerable in the same way.”

The fact that communities of color have been hit disproportionately hard by the pandemic is a societal problem, not a viral one: “Covid invades a world that has been constructed in such a way that race has fundamentally distorted our relationships to one another.” This isn’t new information. Apocalypses only uncover what is already true. 

In 2020, “we realized that the familiar routines that have constructed our world were not as stable as maybe we thought they were,” says Lambelet. Under normal circumstances, you could forget that, mostly, and now suddenly, you can’t. On a day-to-day basis, this is a bummer. On a grand scale, it is a cause for hope.

The earliest apocalyptic writings emerged under oppressive empires, for people living under siege. “There’s a lot of crazy stuff in these visionary texts,” he says, between the seven-headed dragons and the thousand-eyed cherubim. “But their primary message is this: This world is not all there is.” And if there is something else, then there is a reason to keep going. 

“The world is always ending,” says author-musician-anarchist-prepper Margaret Killjoy, who hosts the podcast Live Like the World Is Dying. It’s just that right now, the world seems to be ending with unusual intensity. “I think it’s okay to let this be a big deal,” she tells me, which I find perversely reassuring. “This was a big deal. A lot of people haven’t survived. A lot more people won’t.” It is true that the unit of “a year” is arbitrary, a social construct, she agrees. “But social constructs have meaning. We can do with them what we want.”

“We absolutely have to keep going,” Killjoy adds, pointing to the rise of mutual aid networks, to the summer’s uprisings. “The existing economies haven’t been working for a lot of people for a long time, and alternative ideas are possible right now.” 

Lambelet tends to agree. “I tend to think of the apocalyptic as a rich set of practices for disinvesting from the world,” he tells me. This is more optimistic than it sounds. 

He points me to a passage from the theologian Thomas Lynch: “Nature, capital, gender, and race summarize the set of relations that constitute the world,” Lynch writes. “And this world is both violent and inescapable.” 

“If we think of the world that way,” says Lambelet, “then absolutely, we would want to renounce that world. We would hope for the end of that world, so that we could turn toward relationships of solidarity with our neighbors.” 

I want that. Certainly, I would like to imagine that there is something beyond this.

You could be blindsided by 2020 yet understand that there was a precedent for almost all of it, that none of this came out of nowhere. You could explain the wildfires, and the pandemic, and the election, and its aftermath. You could explain police violence and Brexit and hurricanes. Still, things are always happening, obviously, but these seemed biblical, what with the plagues and pests and fires, against the understated backdrop of attempted coup. Every year feels like the worst year ever, people kept saying, sagely, which made sense, but this wasn’t the regular churn of history, was it?

Maybe it’s ridiculous to demand that 2020 have some kind of cosmic meaning, given that it is an arbitrary 365-day period. But I am not an expert in the cosmos, so I turned to astrologers. I am also not an “astrology person”; still, I had to check.

John Marchesella, a veteran astrologer based in New York City, did not hesitate. “What’s going on in the sky is very special,” he tells me. “It is the end of an era and the beginning of a new era.” 

There is an expression in astrology: “As above, so below,” meaning that whatever is going in the sky is reflected here on Earth, and this year, the sky was weird. “The main thing is the alignment of Saturn and Pluto,” Marchesella says. This is the “conjunction” people keep talking about: The two planets have been moving together all year, peaking in January —  when China announced the new coronavirus,  he notes — and are only just coming out of alignment now. “When Saturn and Pluto align, there is usually some worldwide health issue,” he explains. “The last time this happened, for example, was the outbreak of AIDS, between the summers of 1981 and ’82.” 

Pluto “has a lot to do with viruses,” while “Saturn is manifestation,” Marchesella says. “Anytime the world has experienced some major plague — the Spanish flu, the bubonic plague — the alignment of Saturn and Pluto were always somehow present in the sky.” 

It is not that he saw Covid-19 coming specifically, only that as the two planets began to come into alignment, it was astrologically clear, he contends, that some kind of health care crisis was coming. “But it’s not until the alignment became exact that we found out what the crisis in health care was going to be.” Before that, he’d assumed it would be health insurance.

Astrology is not science, but for millions of people — almost 30 percent of Americans, according to a 2017 Pew Research Center poll — it is a way to find logic in a world we can neither predict nor control. It suggests that history is determined by a system of overlapping cycles, and that, by reading into patterns of the heavens, we can find some semblance of order on the world. Whether you do anything or not, nothing stays the same for too long. 

When we talk, in mid-December, Saturn and Jupiter were starting to move into alignment in the sign of Aquarius, which, Marchesella says, brings hope. And if you were so inclined, you might note that this just happens to coincide with the first doses of the vaccine. 

What follows will be “a wave of optimism,” Marchesella says. It will be “a wave of brotherhood. We will all get on the same page about climate change. We’ll get on the same page about how medical emergencies can affect the entire world.”

There are years, Burke, the history professor, observes, when people, even in the moment, have the sense that something fundamentally has shifted, that the year is not like other years. 

He points to 1848: Revolutions broke out all over Europe. Monarchies teetered on collapse. “It’s one of those years where everybody gets the clear picture: Things are not going to be the same going forward,” he says. 1917 and 1918 are like that, too: There is World War I, the Bolshevik Revolution, the flu. It is universally momentous. You could be having a great year, personally — healthy, loving, nonviolent — and it doesn’t matter. “Objectively, you have a sense that the world went badly, and that you were part of that. In a bad year, it’s much easier for people to feel that their life is under threat.” 

“We’re pattern recognizers,” Burke tells me. Bad years are bad because bad things happen, which establishes a narrative, and then, he says, “We start fitting everything into the Zeitgeist of the story we’ve been telling, and everything becomes an affirmation of just how bad it is,” even when the actual events are relatively ordinary. It is only when you add to the list with disease and wildfires and hurricanes and rising poverty and crumbling democratic norms that you can look at the death of a celebrity well over 80 and see it not as a loss but as a sign.

It can be true the climate is in crisis, that this is likely not the last pandemic, that doom is not out of the question, and also true that most days, life goes on, and people get married and divorced and have kids and do dishes and tell jokes and lose keys. At this point, we can safely say that 2020 was not the end of life on earth, just the end of certainty.  

Intellectually, we’d known this; of course the future wasn’t guaranteed.  If you’d asked before, “Is human society on a steady upward trajectory?” we would have said no, and we would have believed that we believed that. Civilizations rise and fall, we’d all understood, only we hadn’t meant our civilization, not while we were living in it. It is embarrassingly naive to admit faith in the inevitability of progress. At the same time, it is a nice way to get through the day. 

Or at least, it was nice while it lasted. 

Whatever Panglossian sense we’d had that we were living in the best of all possible worlds, Burke says — that’s gone. “Everybody is now aware that even if things could get better, that we have a lot of work to do. And there’s nothing inevitable about it. There’s no force driving us towards better and better.”

If there is hope, it will come from whatever actions we take next.

Rachel Sugar is a writer in New York.

In our collective attempt to flatten the curve, grocery shopping has become a minefield. We are not supposed to leave our homes, yet we have to keep feeding ourselves; as a result, what used to be a comforting annoyance now feels dangerous. Can you touch that cereal box? Why is that person standing so close?  

There is a lot of guidance on how to handle the store, and a lot of it is confusing, if not contradictory. It’s okay to get groceries, we’re told, but not too often. You probably aren’t going to get coronavirus from touching the wrong avocado, or at least, scientists say transmission from food is unlikely. Maybe it’s harder to find pasta now, but you shouldn’t panic about shortages.

To help us navigate this unsettling new world of grocery shopping — Can you reuse your bags? Why isn’t there yeast? — we turned to the experts.

What is the safest way to shop in a grocery store?

While it may be possible to get sick by touching surfaces with the virus, the main way the virus spreads is thought to be person-to-person contact, according to the CDC. The big threat here isn’t pasta boxes; it’s other people.

So the first thing you want to do is minimize your shopping trips (or consider delivery). “If you can get it down to once every week or every two weeks, that’s great,” says Anne-Marie Gloster, a lecturer in the nutritional science program at the University of Washington. And as much as possible, shop at off-peak times, says Joshua Petrie, an assistant research professor of epidemiology at the University of Michigan’s School of Public Health. Some stores are limiting the number of shoppers inside at once, or marking every 6 feet along the checkout line, to show customers how far apart to stand. This is good. The emptier, the better.

Which means that, if you can: Go alone, and — again, if possible — without children, who love touching things. It’s also worth doing some planning before you go, says Gloster, both so you can move quickly once you’re in the store and so you don’t forget anything. This is your big biweekly chance.

The No. 1 priority is keeping physical distance from other people. At the same time, we know the virus can live on surfaces for at least some amount of time, so you do want to avoid touching stuff as much as possible. Gloster “strongly suggests” wiping down the handle of your shopping cart with disinfectant wipes; at this point, many stores have them by the carts.

Consider leaving your phone in your pocket, because your phone is gross. “It’s truly a spit vector,” she says. We spit on it, we fondle it, we put it down on stuff, we pick it up and rub it on our faces. Now is the time to revive the paper list.

Should I wear a mask to the store?

Yes. Given the current shortages, surgical masks and N95 respirators should be reserved for medical workers, but as of April 3, the CDC “recommends wearing cloth face coverings in public settings where other social distancing measures are difficult to maintain (e.g., grocery stores and pharmacies) especially in areas of significant community-based transmission.” 

This represents a major change in the country’s approach to fighting the spread of the coronavirus. Until now, the CDC had been advising healthy people not to wear masks unless they were showing symptoms or had reason to believe they’d been exposed. But — as many other experts have been pointing out for weeks — one problem with that guidance is that there’s no way to know who has it. As many as a quarter of coronavirus cases are asymptomatic, CDC director Robert Redfield said in the week leading up to the new guidance, and even people who do eventually get sick can transmit the virus before showing any symptoms. 

The logic here is pretty straightforward: Since coronavirus mostly spreads when germ-containing droplets make their way into a person’s mouth, nose, or eyes, it makes sense to try to limit how many droplets are floating around in crowded spaces.

The big caveat is that, as noted, traditional medical masks still should go to medical professionals first. While a cloth mask isn’t as good as a medical one, it still offers some protection. Widespread face coverings don’t mean we’ll be able to ease up on other recommendations like social distancing and frequent hand-washing; cloth masks just offer one more layer of protection. If you want to make your own, here’s how.

While we’re talking about protective gear, gloves — which have the potential to carry the virus more or less the same way hands do — are still mostly not recommended for grocery shopping. It’s more important to wash your hands after your trip and avoid touching your face.

Is it okay to bring my own reusable bag, or is it better to just get paper or plastic ones and throw them away?

Reusable bags are fine — assuming you’re diligent about cleaning them. Under more normal circumstances, once a week would be okay. Right now, Gloster advises: “Wash them after you come back, every single time.” (Some experts, however, have expressed less concern about washing bags after each use.)

As cleaning expert Jolie Kerr wrote for Vox, nylon and cotton grocery bags can be machine-washed in cold water and air-dried. If you have reusable bags that can’t be machine-washed, you can wipe them down with a disinfecting wipe or an all-purpose spray and a paper towel. You can refer to the Environmental Protection Agency’s list of disinfectants for use against the SARS-CoV-2 virus to determine if a cleaning agent meets the agency’s criteria for use against the coronavirus.

What about checkout? Should I use cash or credit? Is self-checkout safer?

If you have a contactless option like Apple Pay, that’s probably the best, Gloster says. (Keep your phone in your pocket until then.)

As for cash versus credit? “There’s no good answer here,” Gloster continues. Paying with plastic often means touching a pin pad; cash isn’t known for being especially clean. Self-checkout should reduce contact with a cashier — good for everyone! — but it requires you to touch surfaces other people are also touching.

However you pay, Petrie says, “the most important thing is washing your hands when you’re done.”

Should I be sanitizing my groceries once they’re at my house?

Probably not. There’s a lot we don’t yet know about the coronavirus, but touching infected surfaces “doesn’t seem to be the major way this virus spreads,” Petrie says.

“I am not recommending disinfecting your groceries,” Don Schaffner, a professor of food microbiology at Rutgers School of Environmental and Biological Sciences and host of the podcasts Food Safety Talk and Risky or Not?, told Vox. “This seems like being overly cautious. We don’t know of any cases of Covid-19 transmitted by food, nor of any cases transmitted by food packaging.”

That’s pretty much what the FDA is saying, too. In a statement on March 24, Frank Yiannas, the FDA’s deputy commissioner for food policy and response, noted that “there is no evidence of human or animal food or food packaging being associated with transmission of the coronavirus that causes Covid-19.”

“I’m doing the same things I’ve always done in terms of washing my produce,” says Petrie. “I’m not wiping down my packaging, or leaving it outside for three days, like I’ve seen in some stories.”

While it likely isn’t necessary to sanitize your groceries, you do want to wash your hands after handling packages and when you have finished putting items away.

A lot of stores have special hours reserved for people likely to be more vulnerable to the virus — older people, or people with compromised immune systems. Are those a good idea?

Opinions here vary, and there are, again, no simple answers. In an ideal world, people in high-risk groups would have someone who could do their shopping for them — whether a friend or a delivery service — so they wouldn’t have to leave the house at all. (If you’re the one doing that shopping, great! Follow the steps above.)

Given the world that exists, though, special shopping hours likely have benefits, assuming they’re not so popular that stores actually get busier during those times.

“But if those people are able to come in when there’s fewer people, and they can get help from the staff more easily, then I would think that would be a good thing,” Petrie says.

There’s another benefit, too, Gloster points out: Usually, these special hours are first thing in the morning, which means that the shelves are likely to be fully stocked. If it’s especially risky for you to go out at all, then it’s important you’re actually able to get what you need when you do.

Technically, I “have groceries” — I could definitely eat for a few more days — but it would really be better if I had more garlic and something other than beans. Does that justify shopping?

No. “Put it off, absolutely, as long as you can,” Gloster says. She recommends digging through your cabinets and pulling out all the older stuff you meant to use and never did (canned pineapple, weird ancient grains, etc.).

This is a great time to experiment, because you have no other choice. This is not a great time to get food poisoning, so err on the side of caution and toss what’s expired.

Is it safer for me to get my groceries delivered, even though there are still people involved in this process?

Yes. If you can swing it financially, it may be your best option, Petrie says, simply because you’re coming into contact with fewer people — and potentially, in the case of contactless delivery, no people at all.

Okay, but is it ethical? Am I just asking other people to shoulder the risk for me?

On the one hand: Yes, to avoid going out, where you might contract coronavirus, you are paying someone else to be out, where they might contract coronavirus.

At the same time, not ordering groceries — many of which are delivered by gig workers — means those delivery people don’t get paid, as Saru Jayaraman, director of the Food Labor Research Center at UC Berkeley, told Wired. And by getting delivery, it’s possible you’re helping cut down on crowds in stores.

One thing you can do is order from companies with better sick-leave policies for delivery workers. (Some independent contractors in Instacart’s fleet planned a strike on March 30 over the company’s policies.)

Another thing you can do: not be a jerk, as Jason Del Rey outlines at Recode. Opt for contactless delivery. Don’t dock ratings. Tip generously.

When does preparation cross over into hoarding?

According to Petrie, if you’ve got more than “two to three weeks” worth of food, you’re entering hoarding territory. (If you would like to watch other people hoard, it is a robust subgenre on TikTok.) Ethical considerations aside, that’s just not necessary: The country is not about to run out of food.

I keep hearing there’s plenty of food, so why does it feel like grocery stores are suddenly out of everything?

First of all, says Yossi Sheffi, a professor of engineering systems at MIT and the director of the MIT Center for Transportation, they’re not really out of everything — stores, for the most part, are still pretty well-stocked. “If you go in the morning, you’ll see stores that are full of stuff,” he says. It’s just that some of that stuff is selling out very, very quickly, and it takes suppliers time to respond to the change in demand.

And the demand is changing, explains Sunil Chopra, a professor of operations management at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management. Consider the parable of toilet paper. Generally, toilet paper consumption is extremely consistent, and because everyone knows how much is selling every week, supply chains don’t need a lot of spare inventory sitting around — why would they? The demand is always the same.

Except now, it isn’t. Suddenly, everyone panics, and that manifests in the mass buying of toilet paper, which leads to a shortage, which leads to more panic, and the cycle repeats. However, “just because people have more toilet paper at home doesn’t mean they’re going to use more toilet paper. Your toilet paper consumption stays basically the same.” It’s an artificial shortage, and it should stabilize — he doesn’t see the mania for toilet paper lasting too long. Suppliers, however, aren’t sure yet when rolls will be plentiful again.

“The products for which you will see the biggest shortages are products where normal consumption is pretty stable,” Chopra says. An efficient supply chain won’t have lots of extra — if people consistently buy 100 jars of peanut butter a week, then that’s what they’ll make.

But the thing about peanut butter is that, unlike toilet paper, if you have more of it, you’re likely to eat more of it. “There will be some products where consumption actually goes up,” he says, “and peanut butter will be one of those products.” In those cases — foods where the increased demand is real — we should expect the shortages to go on slightly longer, until consumption dies down or supply chains adapt. We’re already starting to see that happening, as food and supplies that would have once gone to restaurants, stadiums, and universities get redirected to grocery stores or sold straight to consumers.

Are there any specific foods, or types of food, that are going to be especially hard to get?

Potentially. To continue with peanut butter: It’s also possible, explains Alex Scott, an assistant professor of supply chain management at Michigan State University, that in some cases, demand could stay high, and manufacturers might decide not to ramp up production. It’s expensive to drastically increase capacity, and it may only make sense if they expect the current, quarantine-level demand to go on for years. But if they don’t expect that — if they expect kids will go back to school and stop eating so much peanut butter at home, let’s say — then it’s likely not worth it. He anticipates that there indeed may be certain items that stay hard to get until life goes back to something like normal.

If a particular region producing a particular product were hit particularly hard by the virus, that could also temporarily cause problems. While we might see that an item is more scarce than usual, he’s not predicting bare shelves.

The biggest risk to the health of the supply chain may be if workers start to get sick. “If the illnesses surge,” the New York Times reports, “there could be a slowdown in production and distribution.” Even that, though, would likely happen in waves, Chopra says, stressing that policymakers need to prioritize the health and safety of front-line food workers — always, and especially now.

Everyone recommends getting groceries delivered, except slots are always full. Will capacity ever be added?

Probably someday? Last week, Instacart announced plans to hire 300,000 more shoppers over the next three months to meet drastically increased demand; Amazon announced it was hiring 100,000 more people for warehouse and delivery jobs; and the New York-based delivery service FreshDirect is both hiring and adding delivery slots.

Still, Scott doesn’t see it happening overnight. “You can’t ramp that up in a couple of days,” he says. “It’s a longer-term thing. You’ve got to buy the trucks, you’ve got to hire the drivers, you’ve got to get them in your systems. Of course, you can add incrementally week to week to week, but to really scale? I’d think it would be a matter of months,” he says. 

Unlike the rush on toilet paper, though, Scott suggests the demand for delivery could be here to stay. “I think you’ll see long-term changes in behavior from this,” he says. Some number of people are trying these services for the first time, and liking them. “Obviously, we don’t know the future, but I don’t see delivery and e-commerce going down.”

We want to hear from you

What questions do you have about the coronavirus pandemic and the surrounding news? Let us know in the form below, and we might answer your question in an upcoming article, podcast episode, or video. (You can also access the Google form here.)

We are now well into a pandemic, and you are likely aware that, among other measures recommended to stop the spread of the novel coronavirus, we are all supposed to stop touching our faces.

You are also aware, by now, that it is extremely difficult to stop touching your face, as many, many public officials have recently discovered. One study found that, on average, people touch their faces 23 times an hour. We know fetuses touch their faces in utero, which means we all got into the habit before we were even born. Why we do it remains an open question. There is some research suggesting that face-touching may help us to regulate emotions, Wired reports; it’s also possible it could serve some kind of social function.

It is, collectively, our favorite hobby, face-touching, and we didn’t even know. Most of the time, it is unconscious, which is part of why it is so hard to give it up. How can you quit what you don’t even know you’re doing? 

And yet — along with social distancing, thorough hand-washing, and staying home when sick — the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says avoiding our faces is one of the key actions we can take, on an individual level, to stop the spread of disease. “Avoid touching your eyes, nose, and mouth with unwashed hands,” instructs the agency website, along with recommendations for practicing hand hygiene and avoiding close social contact. 

But as the days wear on, and threaten to wear on for the foreseeable future, rules that once seemed straightforward have started to feel markedly less clear. Can I, for example, touch my face in my own home? Can I scratch an itch on my forehead if I make a concerted effort to avoid my nose? Would it be better if I used my sleeve? 

For answers — and face-touch prevention strategies — I turned to a handful of doctors and psychologists. 

Why we can’t stop touching our faces

There are a lot of reasons for our constant face-touching, but one of them is: There is legitimately a lot to adjust up there. “First of all, we have a nose. A lot of times people will touch their nose — something doesn’t feel right up there,” says Douglas Woods, a professor of psychology at Marquette University who studies habitual behaviors. “Maybe you need to rub your eyes, you adjust your hair. And our hands habitually go to our mouth when we eat, and so on.” Basic bodily maintenance like brushing a crumb or scratching an itch involves a lot of face-touching, and from there, it often becomes a habit.

“When we do something, it gets rewarded,” he explains — it feels nice to scratch an itch — “and it just keeps getting rewarded, and pretty soon, we’re doing it without the reward even happening. We’re just used to the behavior occurring.” 

“We’re human,” Anne Liu, a professor and infectious disease physician at Stanford Health Care, reassures me. “That’s how we operate.”

But touching your face can contribute to the spread of the virus

Like most respiratory viruses, SARS-CoV-2 — the virus that causes the disease Covid-19 — enters the body through the respiratory tract, explains Benjamin Singer, an attending physician at Northwestern Memorial Hospital and an assistant professor at Northwestern’s Feinberg School of Medicine.

There are two primary ways this can happen. The first is through direct person-to-person contact: Someone with the virus coughs or sneezes near you, and you inhale those particles. This is the reason you’re supposed to stay six feet apart. 

The second way, though, is through touch, and this is where casual eye-rubbing becomes a problem. We don’t yet know exactly on what surfaces the novel coronavirus can live and for how long, but a preprint (meaning not yet peer-reviewed) paper from researchers at the National Institutes of Health, Princeton, and UCLA suggests it can survive on a variety of surfaces for hours, and in some cases days. 

“The idea is that we touch a lot of things,” says Singer, “and the droplets that these viruses inhabit are possibly on the surfaces we touch — on our phones, our tablets, our remote controls. We touch those and then we touch our face, and that’s the route of infection.”

Right now, touching a doorknob and then your face is not thought to be the main way the virus spreads, the CDC says, but they also say not to touch your face.

Your whole face, though?

The CDC is specifically concerned with touching your eyes, nose, and mouth because, Liu explains, those are “mucosal surfaces where these respiratory viruses can attach very efficiently and become a site of entry into the body.”

But your forehead is not a mucosal surface, so what’s the harm in a quick scratch? In theory, potentially nothing, says Gabriela Andujar Vazquez, an infectious disease physician and associate hospital epidemiologist at Tufts Medical Center. “As long as you don’t put the same hand that’s dirty in your eyes, nose, or mouth, then you’re good. We think it won’t stay on other parts of your face for long.” But if you’re touching other parts of your face? “You probably are touching your eyes, nose, and mouth,” she says.

As far as we know, the virus can’t jump around a surface on its own, Liu says — viruses don’t normally behave that way, and so it’s not going to leap from your hairline into your eyes — but you could move it there.

The bottom line, Singer agrees: “Any time you’re kind of contacting that area near a portal of entry here, you’re putting yourself at risk.”

Okay, but what about ears?

“They’re not a point of entry for the virus,” Andujar Vazquez tells me definitively. Ears don’t have the same virus-friendly cells that eyes and noses do.

Still, you probably should at least try not to scratch them. “I think anything above the neck is something that would be close enough to a portal of entry,” she says, so it’s worth attempting to avoid extra contact.

Can you touch your face at home?

In an ideal world, sure. “If you’ve just been at home, and you know who’s been there, and you know what’s been cleaned, and you’ve been cleaning your own surfaces, and you’re home alone? Go ahead and touch your face,” says Liu. 

But if you’re trying to change your behavior in general, then it may be best to aim for consistency, suggests Fred Penzel, a psychologist in Huntington, New York, who treats body-focused repetitive behaviors. “You’re retraining yourself,” he says. “So if you keep going back to what you’re trying to retrain yourself out of doing, that’s probably not going to contribute much to your effort.”

So how do you quit?

Frustratingly, there is no secret to cutting yourself off from the reflexive pleasure of touching your own face. “I think you have to start off with the idea that you’re not going to be able to achieve it perfectly,” says Penzel. “That’s kind of a foolish goal to set for yourself.”

But you can do better. “The biggest thing is awareness,” Woods advises. “The whole point of a habit is that it happens on autopilot, and you’re not consciously aware that it’s happening.” 

In the past several weeks, a lot of us have become acutely aware. This is step one. (If you are still working on awareness, he recommends videotaping yourself for 20 minutes as you go about your day.) 

Once you’re aware, it’s up to you to take action. “Every time you start noticing your hand going to your face, just make a little mark on a card, or something like that. Pretty soon, when your hand starts to go up to your face, you’ll be like, ‘oh, it’s happening again,’ and you’ll start to put it down,” he suggests.

You can look for replacement behaviors to keep your hands occupied: fidget-spinners, bubble wrap, kneadable rubber erasers. Penzel will have patients go through hardware stores and toy stores, looking for “little manipulable objects that feel right for them.” (In this particular moment, the internet may be your best bet.) Some people find it useful to write reminders on Post-Its. Last week, the Atlantic published an article arguing that if you can’t make yourself stop touching your face for your own health, you might have better luck reframing it in terms of keeping other people healthy. 

Another tactic? Wear a mask. We’re still in the midst of a supply shortage, and N95s and surgical masks should still be reserved for those who need them most — medical professionals and people at high risk — but some experts say that any face covering at all could still have an impact. “A nonmedical mask will not protect you from a direct cough or sneeze from an infected person,” wrote Shan Soe-Lin and Robert Hecht of the nonprofit Pharos Global Health Advisors in a Boston Globe op-ed, “but if you’re practicing good social distancing, any type of face covering is great protection from your biggest threat: your own hands.” 

It’s worth noting: not everyone is in total agreement about this. As the Wirecutter notes, the actual data supporting the idea that masks help prevent face-touching is “limited,” and as Liu points out, no mask (or bandana or scarf) is going to do much if you’re still rubbing your eyes. The main point is: Any steps that get you to stop touching your face are good. 

So you should try, and keep trying. But also — to some extent — you’re going to fail. Which is why it’s so important to wash your hands. “Touching your face is part of human nature,” Singer says. “And that’s why you can take the empowering step of washing your hands actively, so that when you do inadvertently touch your face, you have a much lower risk of getting the virus.” And soap, as we know, is distinctly well-suited to annihilating the coronavirus.

What if you use a tissue or a sleeve instead?

In an ideal world, your face would only itch uncontrollably when you are sitting in your disinfected home with very clean hands. And, on the bright side, it seems as though we’re all about to be spending a whole lot more time that way.

But there are times, even now, where you’re out and your nose itches, and in those times, there are steps you can take to mitigate risk. Giving your hands a quick rub-down with hand sanitizer first would be great, if you’ve got it. If you have a tissue on hand, that “probably helps,” says Singer. “I can’t tell you for sure how much, but it probably helps to some extent.” And if all you’ve got is your sleeve, well, “it’s definitely better than using your hands,” says Andujar Vazquez.

So I’m still touching my face, but I’m touching it less — does that help?

Even if you feel like you’re messing up all the time — and you probably are — it’s worth keeping up the good fight. Because, as Liu explains, the likelihood of getting the virus depends on how much exposure you have. “How many times you touch your face will increase the probability of transmission occurring,” she says. It’s not that any one face-touch is likely to infect you, but the more times you touch your face, the more probable it is that you’ll pick it up. So you’re not perfect. That’s fine. The goal is to minimize the number of opportunities you have to get it, and so yes, keep trying. And more than anything: wash your hands.

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