[This article is part of the developing coronavirus coverage, and may be outdated. Go here for the latest on the coronavirus.]

“If things don’t change, a lot of us might die.”

That’s what Donald G. McNeil Jr., a science and health reporter for The Times, told “The Daily” on Thursday morning about the coronavirus sweeping across the world. When I last wrote about the new pathogen, officially known as 2019-nCoV, it had killed 106 people in China, and whether we were on the precipice of a global health emergency was still an open question.

Now, less than a month later, the virus has killed at least 2,809 people, sickening over 82,600 in total, and is all but sure to spread in the United States. “It’s not so much of a question of if this will happen anymore but rather more of a question of exactly when this will happen,” Dr. Nancy Messonnier, the director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, said in a news briefing on Tuesday.