“It’s amazing what this baby’s been through when he’s been incubating,” my mother said over the phone from New York.

“Let’s move to the country,” said Cat, whose uncle has a farm in England. But by then she was deep into her third trimester, and it was too late to fly anywhere.

As the Hong Kong authorities confirmed dozens of infections, panic buying gripped the city, including at our local minimart, where supplies of face masks and toilet paper were quickly exhausted.

We snapped up the dregs: couscous and ginger cookies. Were we panicking?

Yes and no.

The local fear was driven by memories of the SARS coronavirus epidemic of 2002-3, which had killed nearly 800 people worldwide and 299 in Hong Kong alone. It was impossible not to think about that, particularly with a baby on the way.

Still, we reminded each other, the risk of contracting the virus was probably low. The key thing was to minimize risk.

[How to talk to your kids about coronavirus.]

Cat went on maternity leave and stopped taking public transit, as I began working from home and skipping my beer-league ice hockey games. We also postponed indefinitely our weekly Caesar salads at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club (which said in March that a member who was there in late February had later tested positive).

As February dawned, Hong Kong’s schools were shuttered and most of its border crossings to the Chinese mainland had been closed. Now most people on the sidewalks were masked — not just protesters and riot police — and the mood somehow felt even more eerie and apocalyptic than when the city had literally been burning.