President Trump declares a national emergency

Medical workers’ heavy burden

Why New York City hasn’t closed schools yet

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Still the beginning?

President Trump declared a national emergency for the growing coronavirus pandemic on Friday, capping a week in which the virus began to alter nearly every part of life in the United States. Cases in the U.S. have climbed to almost 2,000, even with sparse testing, and the death toll has risen to 41.

There are signs that we are still much closer to the beginning of the outbreak than the end. Our colleague Sheri Fink reported today that officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have projected that in a worst-case situation, 160 million to 214 million people in the U.S. could be infected.

The projections suggest that 2.4 million to 21 million people in the U.S. could require hospitalization, potentially crushing the nation’s medical system, which has only about 925,000 staffed hospital beds, in an outbreak that could last months or even over a year.

Those dire scenarios are not guaranteed to come true. They don’t account for interventions that are now underway: increased testing, tracing contacts of infected people, and limiting social interactions by banning large gatherings and encouraging people to stay home. (And, yes, frequently washing your hands and not touching your face.)