Here are three of the more unexpected takeaways that could slow the pandemic:

The contagion has a weakness: clusters.

Though a few people catch the virus from random strangers, many more cases are arising within clusters of family members, friends and work colleagues. No one knows yet why this is so, but the experts see it as an opening.

“You can contain clusters,” Dr. David L. Heymann said. “You need to identify and stop discrete outbreaks, and then do rigorous contact tracing.”

Easier said than done, though: “Doing so takes intelligent, rapidly adaptive work by health officials, and near-total cooperation from the populace,” Donald explains.

The healthy should be at home. The sick should be someplace else.

Americans must be persuaded to stay home, the experts told Donald. But that’s not enough.

Instead of advising the infected to remain at home, as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention now does, the experts said that people with the virus should be isolated and cared for away from those they were most likely to pass the virus to — their families.

For most patients, a cross between a dormitory and a first-aid clinic, supervised by nurses, would do, along the lines of the “temporary hospitals” that Wuhan, China, had set up.

Everyone should have to wear a mask in public.

There is little evidence that walking around in a flat surgical mask gives a healthy person much protection — which is why many officials have said not to bother. But the experts Donald spoke to all agreed that it was important for all sick people to wear them to contain their coughs.

How do you achieve that, if wearing a mask marks you out as infected? The lesson from Asia, the experts told Donald, is to make masks mandatory for everybody. Then the sick automatically have one on, and there is no stigma attached. “The Asian approach is less about data than it is about crowd psychology,” he writes.