How to stay healthy

Social distancing comes at a cost to our mental health, as Abdullah Shihipar writes in The Times. The paradox, he says, is that social distancing is required to slow the spread of the virus, but loneliness can make us sick, “furthering our sense of isolation from one another, and making us forget that we’re in this together.”

But technology can be a useful tool for fighting loneliness and keeping your spirits up, according to Priya Parker in The Times.

Amid the grimness, there is an opportunity to experiment: “We’re living in a time of virtual happy hours and virtual dance parties, virtual choirs and virtual ‘breath connection,’ virtual church services and virtual potlucks, virtual quarantine Shabbat and virtual sobriety meetings,” she says.

And if you work from home, Olivia Judson suggests using Zoom, Skype or some other online video conferencing tool to create a “virtual co-working group.”

[Related: “Social distancing doesn’t have to doom your weekends. We have ideas”]

You can also consider forming pacts with a small group of people, as Carolyn Cannuscio, the director of research at the Center for Public Health Initiatives at the University of Pennsylvania, suggests in The Atlantic. If two households are in strict agreement that they will reduce all outside contact, for example, then those two households can socialize together and support each other. “I can see social and mental-health advantages to that kind of approach,” she says.

Now should also be a time for building social solidarity, the sociologist Eric Klinenberg writes in The Times. While the federal government failed to prepare for the crisis, individuals can still work together to combat it and promote public health. He recommends developing lists of volunteers who can contact vulnerable neighbors and help them order food and medications, for example, or calling the nearest homeless shelter or food pantry to ask if it needs anything. Many people have also found ways of building social solidarity online: