What it would take to stop the virus?

China and some of its Asian neighbors have shown that with furious efforts, the contagion can be brought to heel. Our science reporter Donald G. McNeil Jr. spoke to a dozen leading epidemic-fighting experts last week about what it would take for the U.S. and other countries to do the same.

Much of what they recommended was to move faster and on a far larger scale: more testing, more ventilators, more hospital capacity, more limits on travel and gatherings, swifter development of treatments and a vaccine.

Here are three of the more unexpected takeaways that could slow the pandemic:

The contagion has a weakness: clusters.

Though a few people catch the virus from random strangers, many more cases are arising within clusters of family members, friends and work colleagues. No one knows yet why this is so, but the experts see it as an opening.

“You can contain clusters,” Dr. David L. Heymann said. “You need to identify and stop discrete outbreaks, and then do rigorous contact tracing.”

Easier said than done, though: “Doing so takes intelligent, rapidly adaptive work by health officials, and near-total cooperation from the populace,” Donald explains.

The healthy should be at home. The sick should be someplace else.

Americans must be persuaded to stay home, the experts told Donald. But that’s not enough.

Instead of advising the infected to remain at home, as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention now does, the experts said that people with the virus should be isolated and cared for away from those they were most likely to pass the virus to — their families.

For most patients, a cross between a dormitory and a first-aid clinic, supervised by nurses, would do, along the lines of the “temporary hospitals” that Wuhan, China, had set up.

Everyone should have to wear a mask in public.

There is little evidence that walking around in a flat surgical mask gives a healthy person much protection — which is why many officials have said not to bother. But the experts Donald spoke to all agreed that it was important for all sick people to wear them to contain their coughs.

How do you achieve that, if wearing a mask marks you out as infected? The lesson from Asia, the experts told Donald, is to make masks mandatory for everybody. Then the sick automatically have one on, and there is no stigma attached. “The Asian approach is less about data than it is about crowd psychology,” he writes.

A lost sense of smell

There is growing anecdotal evidence that anosmia — loss of the sense of smell — is an indicator of a Covid-19 infection.

The symptom was reported in 30 percent of cases in a large-scale study in South Korea — as well as by patients in Italy, China and Germany.

Sarah Maslin Nir, a New York Times reporter who covered the outbreak in New Rochelle, N.Y., lost her sense of smell last week, and later tested positive for the coronavirus. She shared her experience with us. Here is a condensed version of our interview.

When did you notice that you couldn’t smell?

I had a socially distant lunch with a friend on Perry Street, at opposite ends of a stoop, and she passed me some Clorox wipes. And I thought, Unscented Clorox wipes? That’s weird. But then I looked at them, and they said “lemon scent.”

I quickly made my exit, because I remembered reading an article about two Chinese health care workers and one sentence stuck out to me, that one of the women lost her sense of taste and smell. I went home, got my godmother on FaceTime, opened my spice cupboard and tried sniffing all the spices. I sliced fresh ginger and practically put it up my nose, and couldn’t smell it.

Is anosmia your only symptom?

I don’t have a cough or a fever, but I’m exhausted. And because I can’t smell, food is bland. Eggplant Parmesan tastes like a hot wet book.

How would you describe anosmia to others?

It’s deeply unsettling. It’s a constant reminder that something is deeply wrong with your body. You can perk up and have a good moment or two, but then you eat your Cheerios and your heart misses a beat.

Advice from medical professionals: If you lose your sense of smell, it could be a sign that you are infected. You should isolate at home for at least seven days, even if you don’t have any other symptoms.

Compiled by Vietnam Insider, based on reports from The New York Times