In a “Twilight Zone”–like drama spawned by eerie uncertainty, the world is shutting down a bit more each day, as the coronavirus pandemic accelerates across sixty countries on six continents—all in just nine weeks. There’s no longer an illusion that the contagion can be contained. And this is only the beginning. Marc Lipsitch, a Harvard epidemiologist and the director of the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics, estimated that between forty per cent and seventy per cent of the world’s roughly five billion adults will get the virus, which was first reported in China, in late December.

The United States reached a turning point over the weekend, as cases of the sickness—initially isolated in California, Oregon, and Washington State, on the West Coast—were confirmed in Illinois, in the Midwest, and New York, Rhode Island, and Florida, on the East Coast. (On Monday, four new coronavirus deaths were announced in Washington State, bringing the total to six.) For Americans, the problem is no longer stemming the tide of a foreign pathogen. “The emphasis has shifted—from stopping them from infecting us to stopping us from infecting each other,” Lipsitch said. “There is no American exceptionalism in exposure to coronavirus.”

In the United States, transmission is likely already far, far wider than the ninety publicly confirmed cases on Monday because of U.S. officials’ failure to do sufficient testing. “We haven’t found hundreds or thousands of cases because we’re not looking hard enough,” Lipsitch said. “We don’t have the testing capacity to find out what’s going on. We’ve looked largely at people who had a relation to China or high-risk areas.” That’s too low, he said, by several factors of ten. He called the initial U.S. response “utterly inadequate.” Lipsitch told me that the Chinese government’s response in Hubei Province, the epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak, was more thorough than the approach taken so far in the U.S. by the Trump Administration. In Guangdong province, Chinese health officials tested more than three hundred thousand patients in so-called fever clinics, where people who think they have a fever of any origin are seen. In contrast, the U.S. has been testing a handful of isolated cases. “Our government’s response was something like one per cent—or less—than what China did,” Lipsitch said.

Asia and Europe also have reacted faster to the outbreak. Disruptions have impacted virtually every aspect of public life there. Japan has closed all schools, effective Monday, until April, turning away thirteen million students and leaving their parents scrambling to figure out what to do with them. On Saturday, baseball games were played without audiences, after the Japanese government’s order to cancel or postpone sports and entertainment events: Seiya Inoue, of the Chiba Lotte Marines, homered against the Tohoku Rakuten Golden Eagles in an empty stadium. Models at the Tokyo Girls Collection strutted down the runway with no one in attendance. And horses at the Nakayama Racecourse ran without spectators. In a sign of the risks ahead, a cruise-ship operator in Japan filed for bankruptcy on Monday, due to the many cancellations of night cruises that once ferried up to a thousand people around the sights of Kobe. The fate of the Summer Olympics, in Tokyo, is still to be determined. In South Korea, the government is considering prosecuting the leader of the Shincheonji Church of Jesus for gross negligence or murder, because sixty percent of the country’s more than four thousand confirmed cases are sect members. BTS, one of the country’s most popular musical groups, called off tour dates scheduled for April in Seoul, while the American pop-punk band Green Day postponed shows across Asia.

In Europe, Italy has quarantined eleven towns—encompassing more than fifty thousand people—hit by the coronavirus, while the famed La Scala opera house, in Milan, was shuttered. Despite the precautions, the number of confirmed cases in Italy shot up by fifty per cent over the weekend. On Sunday, the staff of the Louvre, the world’s busiest museum, voted to close its doors, owing to a fear that the Paris institution—and its tens of thousands of monthly visitors—could become a breeding ground for the virus. France, which has more than a hundred cases, enacted a nationwide ban on all public events bringing together more than five thousand people. Switzerland banned all events with more than a thousand attendees, which instantly axed the Geneva Motor Show. In Spain, the Mobile World Congress trade show in Barcelona, was cancelled. Germany, where nine of the country’s sixteen states have reported cases of the coronavirus, cancelled one of the world’s most important travel-and-tourism trade fairs, due to be held in Berlin. Greece cancelled all activities relating to the annual Carnival celebration.

A bistro in Milan lacked customers on February 27th. Photograph by Andrea Mantovani / NYT / Redux

In the Middle East, Iran, a coronavirus hot spot, with the highest mortality rate in the world, cancelled Friday prayers and closed schools and universities in twenty-four of its thirty-one provinces. Saudi Arabia, the guardian of Islam’s holy sites, banned foreign pilgrims. Qatar cancelled the motorcycle Grand Prix, which was scheduled to start Sunday. Morocco announced that it was postponing all sports and cultural events, even though it has no confirmed cases—yet. “This is not a time for fear,” Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the head of the World Health Organization, said on Thursday. “This is a time for taking action to prevent infections and save lives now.”

On Friday, Americans began preparing for possible shutdowns and quarantines. When the first cases were still three thousand miles away, on the West Coast, several stores where I live, in Washington, D.C., were out of Purell, Clorox wipes, and cleaning gloves, and low on toilet paper and nonperishable goods, such as canned vegetables and pasta. “We sold out of every can of beans in the store Friday night,” a manager at a local Trader Joe’s told me.

The growing appearance of public panic may be a good thing, however. Lipsitch called precautionary steps rational. “People are understandably confused. I’ve been telling people to get bleach and alcohol-related cleansers and several months’ supply of medicine and the like,” he told me. “That doesn’t mean that you’ll have to use them, but there is a good chance that you will.”