This interview includes spoilers for Sunday night’s episode of “The Walking Dead.”

We find ourselves in an empty new world. People have retreated to their homes, and out in the streets the sight of some lone person shuffling toward you is cause for alarm — keeping your distance is crucial.

Is this real life … or is it just “The Walking Dead”? The parallels are hard to overlook. With its ghost-town cities and post-apocalyptic mood, AMC’s popular zombie thriller is littered with references to the ruinous disease that ended the Time Before (“Clean Hands Protect Lives” reads a cautioning poster we see in Sunday’s episode of the show) that now seem familiar. And while the lead actress Danai Gurira, who plays the katana queen Michonne, didn’t want to trivialize the ongoing coronavirus crisis by connecting it to the dark fantasy of a TV show, she, too, is unsettled.

“There’s nothing quite like facing a pandemic,” Gurira said in a recent interview. “I’ve never experienced anything like this moment in our time on earth, and we’re still in the middle of it, you know? It’s a real moment-by-moment situation, which does relate to our show’s themes — the struggles that people are having, the tragedies, and the ways that we move forward and get through this together, as a society.”

The society we’ve been immersed in on “The Walking Dead” for the last decade is now losing one longtime member. In Sunday’s Season 10 episode, “What We Become,” Michonne takes her leave of the show, almost exactly eight years after her first appearance in the closing moments of Season 2. She was the mysterious hooded figure who rescued an endangered Andrea (Laurie Holden) by slicing through the undead as two docile “walker” pets stood behind her in chains — a startling entrance that signaled the arrival of a fierce warrior.