The Australia Letter is a weekly newsletter from our Australia bureau. Sign up to get it by email. This week’s issue is written by Jamie Tarabay, a correspondent in the Australia bureau.

SYDNEY, Australia — As someone who has been living between Hong Kong and Sydney for the past few months, I have been engaged in a relentless, entirely circular conversation with family, friends and colleagues about the coronavirus that sprang into the global consciousness a couple of weeks ago and since then has claimed at least 563 lives, while sickening more than 28,000 others.

For people in Hong Kong, where the government still hesitates to act without the blessing of Beijing, the risks of exposure are higher. Some friends recalled being in Hong Kong during the SARS crisis, as we speculated how long schools would remain closed and wondered if the city, which has already known so much tumult over the past nine months, would ever truly recover.

Many people we know did what we did: got out of Dodge, children in tow, to where the air was microbe-free and public transport devoid of the face mask parade. Others have to stay for work, for elderly relatives, or because they do not have the means to leave. There’s a run on everything from hand sanitizer to toilet paper, and most residents are urged to work from home, if they can.

The scale of the virus and its impact remains a guessing game. Will the number of sick people explode, now that the Lunar New Year celebrations are over and everyone is back at work? Will Hong Kong finally close all its border checkpoints with China, as so many people are demanding?