Have you ever seen pictures or movie scenes of a scientist working in a lab wearing gloves, glasses and a lab coat, or even a protective face shield or full body pressurized suit, working with some equipment or tubes within a metal and glass case (a biosafety cabinet)? If you have, then you’ve seen firsthand how scientists keep potentially dangerous things that they are working with (including microbes and viruses) inside the lab.

Scientists can work with very dangerous infectious agents, including viruses like ebola, in lab environments. In the lab, scientists take many precautions to make sure that viruses and other infectious agents don’t get into their bodies or out of the lab.

Different infectious agents require different levels of lab safety, or biosafety levels (BSL). Scientists can only work with Ebola in BSL-4 (the highest level) labs, wearing pressurized suits. What about the novel coronavirus? Scientists can work with and study this virus in BSL-3 and BSL-2 labs, depending on what they are doing with the virus. They are sometimes wearing only gloves, face shields and lab coats, other times wearing a respirator.

So how do scientists working with the novel coronavirus or other infectious agents in a lab keep those pathogens from getting into their bodies or out of the lab and into the world? It’s not just by wearing gloves or covering their faces – this only protects them while they are actively handling something with an infectious agent in it. They follow all kinds of other practices and procedures that keep the infectious agent only where it is supposed to be.

But you don’t need to have a BSL-2 lab to keep the inside of your body free from the novel coronavirus or to prevent spreading it to others. You can learn from tried and true practices and precautions that scientists use in the lab working with viruses like the novel coronavirus!

Here are 10 things you can in your daily life to prevent the spread of infection: