On Mar. 2, 2020, Boston’s top infectious disease researchers, including scientists from Boston University’s National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratories, met on the Harvard Medical School campus.

They discussed next steps for an ambitious international collaboration that focused scientific efforts on understanding, detecting, treating, and preventing novel coronavirus, the disease that’s come to be known as COVID-19.

NEIDL scientists, who expect to begin research on live samples of the novel coronavirus possibly as soon as this week inside their high-level biocontainment labs, joined more than 80 other local researchers at the four-hour-long meeting.

Although its spread appears, promisingly, to be slowing in China, the COVID-19 outbreak is quickly gaining new steam in South Korea, Italy, Iran, and Japan. France, Germany, Spain, Singapore, Hong Kong, and the United States are also seeing a daily uptick in the number of confirmed cases.

To date, the novel coronavirus has infected more than 80,000 people in China and nearly 90,000 people worldwide. Globally, more than 3,000 deaths from the novel coronavirus have been recorded, 6 in the United States.