America Is Starting to See What COVID Immunity Really Looks Like

I, as far as I can tell, have not yet been infected by the virus that causes COVID-19. Which, by official counts, makes me an oddball among Americans.

Granted, I could be wrong. I’ve never had a known exposure or symptoms, but contact tracing in the United States is crummy and plenty of infections are silent. I’ve taken many coronavirus tests, but not that many coronavirus tests, and it’s always possible that some of their results missed the mark.

If I am correct, though, then I’m in the rapidly dwindling fraction of Americans who are still coronavirus-naive. Roughly 60 percent of people in the U.S. have caught SARS-CoV-2, according to the latest CDC estimates, which go through February of this year. And that’s very possibly a serious underestimate. The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, a global health-research center at the University of Washington, puts the tally higher,, as of the beginning of April. And Virginia Pitzer, an epidemiologist at Yale’s School of Public Health, who’s been , told me the true number might even exceed 80 percent. No matter how you calculate it, though, the proportion of Americans who have been infected dwarfs .