Which brings us to the next reason I believe we should be cautiously hopeful here. Statistically speaking, one of the pitfalls of attempting to measure the deadliness of a new virus is that we risk presenting something as anomalous simply because of how we choose to count it. As I write this there are people who may die of what is recorded as coronavirus but which in any other year would go down as bronchitis, pneumonia, or simply old age. This point was made recently by John Lee, a former professor and consultant pathologist for the British National Health Service. The fact that a death is attributed to coronavirus, as opposed to weak lungs or a compromised immune system, does not mean that the virus is even inherently as deadly as the figures suggest because by definition we cannot know what would have become of many of these patients if they had contracted other illnesses. This is, as Lee observes, a perennial problem for all hospital-based disease testing regimes. (The impression that the virus is not as deadly as some have guessed is also born out by the experience of passengers on the Diamond Princess, where given the closed nature of a vessel and the average age of the passengers, one might have expected far more than seven passengers to have died.)

What this means, in other words, is that deaths from the virus will not necessarily translate into an aberrant number of overall fatalities by the standards of any other year. Whether this in fact happens is the surest test of a virus’ lethality. At the risk of sounding callous, it is worth pointing out that 2,839,205 deaths were recorded in 2018 in the United States. Months from now it will be possible for us to go back and ask ourselves whether significantly more people died in these months than we would have expected during a similar period in an average year. Weeks ago fatalities from the virus were doubling every two days here; this has now decreased to roughly every four days, which is similar to what has been observed in Germany. While it is far too early to say for sure, I think one can plausibly argue that in this country the total deaths attributed to coronavirus might come in under the levels of the exceptionally deadly 2018 flu season, which killed at least 80,000 people. If the Bendavid and Bhattacharya model is correct, we would see about 20,000 deaths even if 200 million Americans were to become infected.