Of course, not everyone has this range of choices available to them. Some areas don’t have many online food-delivery options, and many people don’t have the money for delivery, now or ever. But no matter what choices you have, as long as you’re observing the aforementioned general principles, no option seems to be significantly riskier than the others on a per-trip basis—but the risk does go up with each trip, and getting restaurant food is something you’d probably have to do more often than (and in addition to) getting groceries.

Lastly, a bit of good news: “We have no evidence that the virus is transmitted by food,” said Donald Schaffner, a food-science professor at Rutgers University. So wherever you get your food from, it’s most likely safe to eat, though discarding the packaging that takeout meals come in and washing your hands after bringing home groceries are good practices.

How often should I go to the grocery store?

“The less often you can go, the better,” Carlton said.

What that looks like in practice likely depends on how much food you can transport and store. The example Tamar Lasky, an epidemiologist, gave me was, “If I used to buy groceries three times a week, I am now trying to consolidate my purchases to once a week.” There’s no correct frequency, but I’d say, after speaking with several public-health experts, that if you’re going to the store more than once a week, you should try to space out your visits more, if you can. (You might also consider buying foods that last longer, such as root vegetables, apples, yogurt, and hard cheeses.)

Keeping your number of grocery-store visits down doesn’t mean eating like a prepper, with dehydrated meal kits and Spam. When I asked Salata how much riskier it would be if I went to the grocery store once a week versus once every two weeks, he said, “I think if you’re careful, in the long run it’s not going to make that much of a difference”—careful being a reference to the guidelines mentioned above.

This minimize-your-trips mentality also applies to takeout and restaurant deliveries: Instead of getting meals from two different restaurants in one week, consider getting two meals’ worth of food from the same restaurant. (Of course, this way of thinking is also an implicit argument against ordering food from restaurants at all, because if you can get a week’s worth of food from a grocery store, that spares you and others from making any other food-related trips on your behalf that week.)

If I limit myself to one grocery-store trip every two weeks, is it possible that I’d have to buy so much food that I’d produce shortages for others?

Nope. “Shopping for a 2-week supply is reasonable in the current circumstances and unlikely to threaten the supply chain,” Steven Taylor, a professor at the University of British Columbia and the author of The Psychology of Pandemics, wrote to me in an email. “Even panic-buying at its worst didn’t threaten the supply chain. It simply created short-term shortages in stores (and food banks), which were replenished fairly quickly.”

Is it ethical to get delivery?

The people ferrying food from grocery stores and restaurants to paying customers are currently caught in a terrible bind: They can either make money and risk exposure to the virus or stay home and forgo some or all of their income. “I’m afraid to make deliveries because I’m afraid to die,” one delivery worker wrote in a group chat that was shared with The New York Times.