Over the next few weeks many of us will be weighing up the choice of whether to work at home – those of us whose jobs make that choice a realistic option, in any case. As someone who does work at home I can report you'll face some challenges, not least that you’ll miss the camaraderie – but the upside is that less time spent chatting over coffee means you get your work done all the quicker. And the cost and time savings are welcome compensation.

Many of us, if we become infected, won’t have a choice, we’ll need to self-isolate. Here are ten things you need to know, from how to get the food you need to how to avoid infecting your family. And don’t forget your pets – we have someone to walk our little dog Betty if that becomes necessary. The good news is that there’s no evidence that dogs can contract COVID-19, but keep washing your hands after handling them and try not to sneeze over them as they could become unwitting carriers.

We’ve been able to call on our global network to provide the best possible coverage of this pandemic. The bleak joke doing the rounds this week is that after four years of insisting that the UK was tired of hearing from experts, the government is finally listening. But as readers of The Conversation already know, in this era of fake news, social media silos and disinformation, it’s the people whose job it is to know about diseases and public health whose voices need to be heard. Over the next few weeks we’ll find out whether the government has been giving weight to the right experts over crucial issues such as “herd immunity” and, as people ask why UK schools are not being closed as in many other countries, consider this from the US.

But it’s important not to become too obsessed by this crisis and manage your news consumption accordingly. There’s still plenty to be cheerful about, not least the release of the final part of Hilary Mantel’s outstanding Wolf Hall trilogy, the brilliant 18-century linguist who linked the Celtic languages or the recent discovery of a tiny dinosaur skull preserved in a piece of amber.

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