Rural communities “tend to be older, with more chronic illness,” making people more at risk of severe Covid-19. Early this week, Kodiak Island, part of an archipelago in southwest Alaska, issued a “hunker down” proclamation, asking residents to stay at home as much as possible.

For nurses, the biggest news this week wasn’t the declaration of the COVID-19 epidemic as an official pandemic. It was the CDC’s release on March 10 of new interim infection prevention and control recommendations for COVID-19.

The White House advised all Americans to avoid groups of more than 10 and urged older people to stay at home altogether in a set of new guidelines designed to fight a spreading coronavirus outbreak.

Six counties in the San Francisco Bay Area on Monday announced a “shelter in place” order restricting all residents to their homes, with few exceptions, for at least the next three weeks — the strictest move announced to date in the U.S. in the response to the coronavirus.