How do you feel? I’m not asking if you have a temperature and a cough. What I mean is: how do you feel in yourself? How are you coping emotionally? I ask because, since we have all become amateur and (frankly, quite crap) epidemiologists, we have been ignoring what really matters. Because so much of what happens next in the coronavirus crisis depends on our emotional responses.

I was ill last week, and pretty much self-isolated. Easy enough for me – it’s something I have done for 20 years anyway as a freelance writer. But when I did go out, I saw restaurants that were packed with people, and chatted on the bus to a 76-year-old who was full of beans, despite having just come out of hospital, having had pneumonia. She was not going to stop living her life, she told me, and she wouldn’t be doing anything she was being advised to do. No self-isolation for her.

I wonder if she will be arrested for being so sparky, when the new police powers that have been floated come in. She may well be in denial. That’s how the whole of the UK apparently looks to the rest of Europe. Denial is about not wanting to feel afraid or not feeling entitled to voice fear. What works in such a situation is to say that, yes, we are all afraid and it is OK to be afraid. To admit to that is one of the steps that will help us get through this.

The reality is that for any self-isolation or quarantine to work, we need to be willing – even if just for now – to be compliant. And that depends on a level of emotional intelligence that seems to be severely lacking in our culture.

Slagging off Boris Johnson seems another form of denial. Would Jeremy Corbyn be doing any better? If scoring party-political points at a time like this is your priority, you have the incurable virus of self-righteousness. Sorry. People will die in huge numbers, and it is true, of course, that inequality and austerity kills. This is not new information, but this virus is new and how we behave cannot be based on how we behaved three months or even three days ago. We don’t have enough ventilators, hospital beds or the testing that seems more important than ever in how we move forward; arguing and point-scoring won’t help with those essential, urgent practicalities.

The resilience of those who refuse to change their behaviour after a terror attack – the people who go out anyway – is absolutely no use here. The virus doesn’t care about your bravery, your politics or your views on globalisation. It doesn’t care if you trust the government or hate Brexit.

It doesn’t matter if you are a catastrophist (“it’s the end times”) or a conspiracy theorist (“this is a cull of those we can’t pay for any more”). What matters now is whether people will take the only advice there is: scrupulous hand-washing and self-isolation.

There is all sorts of nonsense being talked about the blitz spirit

Some things we know will help. When people are in terrifying situations – say, in the military – it helps to give them lots of things to do. Activity can help conquer fear. Loneliness stresses the immune system, so if our old people are to be isolated, we at least have the tech now to connect. Teach your elderly folk how to Skype.

The mad scramble for toilet paper is understandable, as it allows people to feel that they are responding to a crisis – that they are therefore mid-crisis – and able to imagine a time when the crisis ends. But it is no more helpful than the opposite response: keep calm and carry on. There is all sorts of nonsense being talked about the blitz spirit, all of which ignores the fact that during the blitz many people had breakdowns and suffered what we now call post-traumatic stress disorder.

Behavioural science can tell us only so much, just as data science has its limitations. There are those, though, who have studied people’s reactions to disaster. Sandro Galea, the dean of the Boston University School of Public Health, has written about the five stages of reaction, which I will summarise here as: 1) self-preservation: fear and anxiety; 2) group preservation, where changes in social behaviour begin; 3) blame-setting: the psychological consequences fall into place as we realise we have to change our normal activities; 4) justice-seeking: we want to see what and who caused the disaster; 5) renormalising – basically, we have adapted to the crisis and its consequences.

As with stages of grief, these processes are not linear, but, right now, we are at stage one. Indeed, we have to legitimise fear in order to make necessary changes.

There is no going back to pre-virus times. Priorities will have to be reordered. Not all work matters that much. Not all flights have to be taken. Those in authority have very little. The NHS and its staff is the most precious resource this country has. No one will doubt that again.

We need now to create community at a distance; a new way of being – and please no one else send me that video of Italians bloody singing. What helps you may not help me. And vice versa.

Let us have our own individual responses and anxieties, because this is how we adapt to the new normal. I don’t yet know what this is any more than you do. Living with uncertainty is hard, but uncertainty has been the emotional pandemic of recent years anyway.

Those who know anything for sure right now are precisely those that I trust the least. I reread The Plague last week, in between necking paracetamol and arguing on Twitter. My God, Camus is great.

“There’s no question of heroism in all this,” he writes. “It’s a matter of common decency. That’s an idea which may make some people smile, but the only means of fighting a plague is – common decency.”

Will common decency survive the virus? Will we find it within ourselves? I don’t know, but that seems to me the only vaccine we have.

• Suzanne Moore is a Guardian columnist