It looks like the whole country is going to be “hunkering down” for at least a few weeks, and maybe even longer. As for myself, I’ve been exiled to a remote undisclosed rural location devoid of all human contact to wait out the coronavirus pandemic.

So what now? Undoubtedly you have heard or read many tips from health professionals and government officials for keeping yourself healthy. Avoid large gatherings. Keep your “social distance.” Wash your hands. But those things are all old hat by now. What might you be missing that could really make a difference?

The more you read about this, the more you realize that the key to true success against the virus is to embrace environmental incorrectness. Many of the environmental fads of the last few years turn out to be exactly what you should not be doing. Like it or not, you are now going to have to use more plastics and increase your “carbon footprint.” Hey, it’s the least you can do to keep yourself and your family and friends alive.

Here are a few basic points that I’ve gathered from around the web:

Immediately give up using re-usable tote bags, and go for single use plastic grocery bags. Those reusable tote bags pick up germs and spread them all over the place for days. You need bags that you can use once and get rid of immediately before they infect you and everyone around you. John Tierney has the scoop in today’s New York Post: “Researchers have been warning for years about the risks of these [reusable] bags spreading deadly viral and bacterial diseases, but public officials have ignored their concerns, determined to eliminate single-use bags and other plastic products despite their obvious advantages in reducing the spread of pathogens.” Tierney has plenty more details at the link, including citations to articles in scientific journals. And while you’re at it, those highly sanitary single use plastic straws are also an excellent option to avoid contact between your lips and what may be a contaminated cup or glass.

To the extent that you must travel around, you can avoid all common conveyances (planes, trains and buses). Those could be filled with carriers of the virus. Instead, go by yourself in an automobile. Carpool? Forget it. How do you know that your companion is not infected? It’s one person per car for the duration.

Crank up the thermostat. Researchers in China have determined that the coronavirus spreads most successfully at 8.72 deg C (that’s about 48 deg F), and its spread slows progressively the warmer you get from there. “The study, by a team from Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou . . . [concluded that] the ‘virus is highly sensitive to high temperature.’” To be fair, this study was more about outdoor than indoor temperatures; but why take a chance in the environment you can control?

And while we’re at this, I also have a suggestion for the government: Shrink the CDC by half. That one may sound counterintuitive. Isn’t this exactly the time when we need a team of career experts focused on control of infectious diseases to step forward and take the reins?

If you believe in the myth of the expert bureaucrats who run things with their perfect knowledge, then that is indeed how it ought to work. But in fact, the response to the current crisis is being run not by CDC, but rather by a team out of the White House led by Vice President Pence and Dr. Anthony Fauci.

So what’s up with CDC? It was boom times for them during the AIDS epidemic in the 90s, but that one has been well-controlled for a long time now. The last big infectious disease scare was the swine flu in 2009. Without new infectious diseases to worry about, CDC has been focusing its efforts instead on a desperate form of mission creep to be sure it preserves its budget and staffing levels. Go browse around their website to get an idea of how far they have strayed from infectious diseases: things like child abuse and neglect prevention, elder abuse, motor vehicle safety (don’t we have easily five other bureaucracies for that?), second-hand smoke, terrorism (I’m not making this up), and this is just the beginning.

But CDC actually has made a contribution in the current situation: using bureaucratic obstructionism and turf protection to slow development of private tests for the virus. From Ronald Bailey at Reason, March 11, relying substantially on reporting from the New York Times:

[O]fficials at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) stymied private and academic development of diagnostic tests that might have provided an early warning and a head start on controlling the epidemic that is now spreading across the country. . . . CDC required that public health officials could only use the diagnostic test designed by the agency. That test released on February 5 turned out to be badly flawed. The CDC's insistence on a top-down centralized testing regime greatly slowed down the process of disease detection as the infection rate was accelerating.

Somehow it’s always the same story with an entrenched bureaucracy. Thankfully we have a crisis management team at the White House, and a private sector, to step in and deal with the pandemic.