Halfway through Angela Hsu’s Austria trip in early March, the coronavirus outbreak in Europe began to intensify and the cities on her itinerary started shutting down. During her first few days in Austria, locals seemed unfazed by the novel coronavirus. But by the time she, her dad, and two family friends left on March 16, the country had more than a thousand cases and was enacting emergency policies. Their flight back to her home in Taiwan was canceled, but they were able to book seats on a nearly empty China Airlines flight the same day.

Federal officials are working on ways to rate counties by their risk of coronavirus transmission, President Donald Trump said Thursday. He told the nation’s governors in a letter that he hopes the guidelines will help them make “decisions about maintaining, increasing, or relaxing social distancing and other measures they have put in place.”

In Washington state, a hospital sent 140 expectant mothers elsewhere so it could refit its birthing unit to treat COVID-19 patients. New York City is beyond that: It is converting a convention center into a temporary hospital. Health officials set up a makeshift morgue outside Bellevue Hospital in Manhattan and are searching for more beds and medical equipment. The city’s police force is shrinking as officers fall ill, but they still have orders to patrol the nearly empty streets to enforce social distancing.

A small church in Cleburne County, Ark., has become a local epicenter of the COVID-19 outbreak. Nearly three dozen people connected to Greers Ferry First Assembly of God have tested positive for the new coronavirus, including Pastor Mark Palenske and his wife, Dena, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette reported. The other 80 members of the church are still waiting for test results.

As the epicenter for the coronavirus pandemic moved to the United States—with the number of new cases doubling every two days—a hush moved into the streets. It’s a quiet eerily similar to what I first experienced in the Middle East, walking streets of cities and towns ISIS had emptied. A city without people is like a graveyard, one of the soldiers on patrol told me then. 

By Tuesday, the governors of Indiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Mexico, Oregon, Washington, and West Virginia had told residents to stay home, while other states’ shelter-in-place orders announced over the weekend took effect. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said his state’s rate of COVID-19 infections is doubling about every three days. In just two weeks, New York might have 40,000 people needing intensive care, far more than the 3,000 ICU beds available, he said.

If the United States were a football team, our opponent would score two touchdowns before our players were even paying attention—but we’d claw back into the game during the second quarter and win going away in the second half. 

That’s the way World War II went. That’s how the Space Race with the Soviet Union went in the 1960s, supply side economics went in the 1980s, and the War on Terror went in 2001 and 2002. And that’s the way the coronavirus war is likely to go in 2020 and 2021.