Early research shows that health care workers are more likely to contract the coronavirus than the average person and, when they get it, to suffer more severe symptoms. Many doctors are already rationing the protective gowns, gloves and masks that are necessary to keep them safe.

They are also drawing up their wills.

Dr. Au and her husband sat down over the weekend and updated the list of who should take care of their children if both of them die. “We have it four deep now,” she said. “The top two choices are older and these people are in a high-risk group. The third person is a doctor. So we added a fourth person who is a low risk for contracting this thing. As the backstop in case it comes to that.”

Dr. Jane van Dis is an ob-gyn in Los Angeles and the medical director for Maven, a telemedicine platform. She is also a single mother. “I realized that if something happened to me that my life is all in my head,” she told me. “So on Saturday I combed through all of my policies — life insurance and disability — and all of my credit cards, my mortgage, my auto loan, trying to think of all of the details of my life so that if someone were trying to take it over for me they could.”

Dr. Marshall said he’s been encouraging his colleagues who don’t yet have wills to draw them up. “We know what’s coming,” he told me. “There are a good number of people who are going to die here,” he said, and “health care workers will be part of that number.”

Dr. Vicki Jackson, the chief of palliative care and geriatrics at Mass General, said she recently told her husband that she wants him to remarry if she dies. “But it’s important to me that she be spunky,” she told him. “No milquetoast role models for the kids.”

These are the kinds of conversations that many doctors have spent their careers urging patients facing serious illness to have. They are now showing us how it’s done.

“Most people are in complete denial that your life can change on a dime,” said Dr. Jackson. “In medicine we know it, and we are more likely to talk about it.” Because of the coronavirus outbreak, she added, “the veil is less opaque right now. And I don’t think that’s bad.”