Understanding 2019-nCoV aka the Wuhan Coronavirus, is likely to be essential to not contracting it unless you plan to rely on dumb luck.* This virus is an RNA virus in the same family as SARS and MERS, both of which were lethal infectious viruses with a case fatality rate of 9.5% and 34%, respectively. SARS and MERS were both contained successfully before they became truly pandemic.
At this point some definitions are in order. An epidemic is the widespread occurrence of a particular disease, usually communicable, in a given geographic location. It is generally understood to be confined to a region or country.
A pandemic is an occurrence of a communicable disease that transcends local geography and is typically understood to encompass multiple nations or the world at large. It’s arguable exactly when a disease becomes pandemic, but here the term is used to mean when the disease has begun to spread exponentially outside of the nation it began in. In the case of 2019-nCoV, this has yet to happen possibly because:
* It has happened but we just don't know about it yet. There are countries where disclosure may be withheld, and there are populations that are poorly served in terms of medical care where it might not be obvious for a while that the disease has become epidemic.
* The countries where infected people have (so far) traveled to have good public health and medical care systems and are organized and disciplined enough to impose isolation or quarantine and to be able to test for the presence of the virus, including in people who are deemed to be at risk, or who are asymptomatic. The difference between isolation and quarantine is that quarantine is applied to individuals or populations who are apparently healthy but are deemed to be at risk for infection, whereas isolation is what is done to people who are actually ill or infected. People who are sick with 2019-nCoV are quarantined; they are isolated. In a quarantine, there is not necessarily (and often there is no) requirement for isolation; people go about their daily lives and take isolation measures, such as wearing masks or not, as they choose. It is important to note that historically involuntary quarantine has been ineffective at preventing the spread of a novel, airborne, highly infectious disease.
The view in the West that now predominates is that involuntary quarantine does more harm than good and only delays the inevitable spread of the epidemic or pandemic. Furthermore, per this view, involuntary quarantine should only be applied in an evidence-based manner: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1854977/ Clearly, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) does not share this view.
* Some unknown factor may be facilitating the spread of the disease inside China that does apply elsewhere. This seems highly unlikely.
* The apparent relative minority of serious cases versus mild or asymptomatic cases, coupled with the comparatively long mean time to the onset of symptoms and the further mean delay of 4.5 +/- 2.1 days until the serious symptoms present (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31986264) may mean that it is still too early in the pandemic to know whether the disease has begun to grow exponentially outside of China, or not.