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                      -- CNN - The best defense against coronavirus:

"Editor's Note: Colleen S. Kraft, MD, MSc, is the associate chief medical officer at Emory University Hospital and an associate professor in the Department of Medicine as well as an assistant professor in the Department of Pathology at Emory University School of Medicine. She is also the associate medical director of Emory's Serious Communicable Diseases Unit. Read more opinion at CNN.

(CNN) As an infectious disease physician and medical microbiologist who has successfully treated patients with Ebola virus disease in the US, I am being asked a lot of questions about the new coronavirus, Covid-19.

One person I spoke with was concerned that the reading glasses she had ordered from China might be contaminated with the virus and dangerous to her health. The short answer: highly unlikely.

While coronavirus can exist on surfaces for days, conditions such as temperature and humidity must be favorable. Covid-19 is primarily spread through close contact with someone who is infected.

During a viral pandemic, we are often our own worst enemies.

Point in fact: We touch our face with our hands, including our nose, eyes, and mouth -- areas with mucous membranes, an average of 15 to 23 times an hour. Much of the time, we don't even realize we are doing it. We also touch door handles, subway poles, handrails, saltshakers, other people's hands and grocery carts. We inhale tiny droplets that come from someone sneezing or coughing nearby.

The good news? The steps you can take to protect yourself against the extremely low chance that you might get exposed to coronavirus in the US will also guard against the widespread outbreak we are actually experiencing here -- seasonal influenza.

While at least 60 cases of Covid-19 have been confirmed in the US, no one has died of it here, while this year's influenza has infected at least 29 million in the US and killed about 16,000 so far.

Covid-19 is spreading easily and sustainably in the Hubei province and other parts of China, and has been confirmed in more than two dozen other countries. While the global death toll has so far topped 2,700, it's good to remember that more than 80% of the Covid-19 cases have been mild, requiring little to no medical intervention, and it is much less deadly than severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS), which are also coronaviruses.

Here is the best advice I can give you, to avoid any virus and flu: Be intentionally hygienic in public and during interactions with others. Hand hygiene is a cornerstone of infection prevention. Effective hand hygiene requires appropriate duration and thoroughness, which should be a goal each time our hands are cleaned.

Use soap and water for the amount of time it takes to sing the "Happy Birthday" song, or an alcohol-based hand sanitizer. In a study we conducted on hand hygiene, the most common areas missed by hand washers were thumbs, wrists, and in between fingers."

"LONDON —Immediately after Boris Johnson completed his Monday evening news conference, which saw a somber prime minister encourage his fellow citizens to avoid "all nonessential contact with others," his aides hustled reporters into a second, off-camera briefing.

That session presented jaw-dropping numbers from some of Britain’s top modelers of infectious disease, who predicted the deadly course of coronavirus could quickly kill hundreds of thousands in both the United Kingdom and the United States, as surges of sick and dying patients overwhelmed hospitals and critical care units.

The new forecasts, by Neil Ferguson and his colleagues at the Imperial College COVID-19 Response Team, were quickly embraced by Johnson’s government to design new and more-extreme measures to suppress the spread of the virus.

The report is also influencing planning by the Trump administration. Deborah Birx, who serves as the coordinator of the White House coronavirus task force, cited the British analysis at a news conference Monday, saying her task force was especially focused on the report’s conclusion that an entire household should self-quarantine for 14 days if one of its members is stricken by the virus.

The Imperial College group reported that if nothing was done by governments and individuals and the pandemic remained uncontrolled, then 510,000 would die in Britain and 2.2 million in the United States over the course of the outbreak.

These kinds of numbers are deeply concerning for countries with top-drawer health-care systems. They are terrifying for less-developed countries, global health experts say.

If Britain and the United States pursued much more ambitious measures to mitigate the spread of coronavirus, to slow but not necessarily stop epidemic over the coming few months, they could reduce mortality by half, to 260,000 people in the United Kingdom and 1.1 million in the United States.

Finally, if the British government quickly went all-out to suppress viral spread — aiming to reverse epidemic growth and reduce the case load to a low level — then the number of dead in the country could drop to below 20,000. To do this, the researchers said, Britain would have to enforce social distancing for the entire population, isolate all cases, demand household quarantines of households where anyone is sick, and close all schools and universities — and do this not for weeks but for 12 to 18 months, until a vaccine is available."