The Australia Letter is a weekly newsletter from our Australia bureau. Sign up to get it by email. This week’s issue is written by Besha Rodell, a columnist with the Australia bureau.

When I stepped off a Qantas flight from Los Angeles to Melbourne this past Tuesday, health officials in protective gear handed me a piece of paper instructing me to self-quarantine for 14 days. Strangely, those instructions came as a relief. At last, someone was giving me definitive guidelines on what to do in response to the coronavirus pandemic.

I have spent the last three weeks traveling in South America, Mexico, the Caribbean and the United States on assignment for Food & Wine and Travel & Leisure magazines as part of a project that was supposed to keep me on the road for four months. The decision to halt that travel was made collectively, between myself and my editors, but until late last week it did not feel like an easy decision. The project is important for the magazines, and it represents a huge chunk of my yearly income. The logistics of getting it done are complex and difficult under the best circumstances. In the middle of last week it was unthinkable that international travel would grind to a halt, and that isolation would become the norm throughout most of the world. There was no easy answer, until there was.

It was a relief to arrive back in Australia, and not just because of that piece of paper with its definitive instructions. I entered the United States three times last week (a result of a very complicated travel schedule), and at three different U.S. airports customs officials never questioned where I’d been or whether I was unwell. Once those procedures were put in place, the day after my last entry to the U.S., they caused hourslong logjams. My journey through customs in Australia was thorough and swift.

But once I was out of the airport, the confusion of everyday life in the time of a pandemic resurfaced. My teenage son’s school principal emailed instructions on what to do if you were keeping your child home for preventive reasons, and a directive to contact the class coordinator if the circumstances were complex. Since I am under quarantine, and my son is sick with a fever and cough, I contacted the coordinator, who in turn resent me the principal’s original email, telling me to follow those instructions. When I told him that the instructions he was sending me told me to contact him, he reiterated that I should follow the principal’s instructions.