As the coronavirus starts to seriously hit the United States, Americans might want to look at South Korea for an example of what the coming months will be like.

This is an ideal case of course. South Korea has done a better job than any other democratic country in controlling the outbreak of COVID-19. A far more frightening possibility is an Italian future for the US. But as an American who has lived through the South Korean outbreak since the start, here a few suggestions and tips.

1. The central government’s response will be crucial to how the virus impacts national life.

This may be controversial because of the Trump administration’s laggard response, but there is simply no replacing the capacity, resources, and visibility of the national government’s sovereign authority, especially in a time of crisis. If only because citizens are allowed to travel inside their own country, a federalized or provincial response will always be insufficient. Corona will become the dominant issue of the US central government very soon – whether US President Donald Trump likes it or not. It has all but swallowed the South Korean government now. There is little choice; this is all you see on the news and government websites now. You will be taking a lot of your cues from Washington, DC.

2. Try to structure your time indoors.

Self-quarantining is a lot more challenging than you think, especially if you have kids. For the first few days, it almost feels like a vacation from work or a national holiday when you get to stay home on a random weekday. But that wears off pretty quickly. It is very easy to slip into your most dysfunctional home habits – letting your sleeping hours get confused; surfing the internet all day; letting your kids run wild (because they will, because they will get cabin fever before you). My wife and I have tried hard, as this really set-in recently, to build a home schedule for when we will read to our kids, when they get online education when they get to just watch TV for a while so that we can get some work done, and so on.

3. Do not count on getting much telework done if you have young kids at home.

One obvious divide in the emerging ‘telework’ debate is who can really do it and who cannot. Anyone with young kids and without domestic help will really struggle to do this. Your kids are going to deal with home quarantining much worse than you. Their energy levels are incompatible with being locked in the house all day. The BBC Dad incident a few years ago which made me briefly famous will happen to many people now. I get lots of tweets and emails about that already. Realistically, you are going to be able to work only two or three hours a day now. Even if you just drop your kids in front of the TV all day, which you should not, that will only work for a few hours before they demand your attention yet again. This will be a huge fight between teleworking parents and their employers.

4. You will eventually have to leave the house; figure out how to do it safely.

You will get cabin fever. It is inevitable. After a month of going outside for just an hour or two a day (to the store for food mostly), you will start sleeping badly and getting fidgety. Your kids will have it even worse. They will be climbing the walls. My family gave up and took the kids for a hike a few days ago. Off-trail nature sites are a good way to leave your house while maintaining social distance. Anything indoors is obviously still a bad idea.

5. Don’t just eat and watch TV and panic.

Both Korean and American media are starting to run stories about health while you are trapped inside. This is a struggle. You want to hear the news, so it is tempting to leave the TV on all the time or to check your phone constantly. These are obvious magnets for your kids too; they love screens. Pretty soon you are all watching too much TV. Worse, all the TV news now is, understandably, pretty disturbing, as is your Twitter feed. So it is easy to get panicked. Together with your cabin fever, call it ‘corona anxiety.’ And naturally, because you are watching TV and unnerved, you probably start eating too much as well.

Pushing back on this is important. Jogging, especially in the mornings before your kids wake up, might be possible in your neighborhood, depending on its density of corona. It is easy to socially distance from people on the road, and it gets you out of the house for at least an hour or so. You should definitely not go to a gym; all those poorly-cleaned surfaces are a petri-dish for corona. Order a yoga mat, some push-up grips, cable resistance bands, and so on and try training in your house. It is a mediocre solution at best, but at least you are not festering.

These are just a few ideas we and our friends have come up with as this has dragged on. It is tough, but we have adapted, and you will too. We all have no choice.

Robert E. Kelly is a professor of international relations in the Department of Political Science and Diplomacy at Pusan National University.