Your Covid Cribsheet, Updated

Mysteries remain but one thing is known: We will be living with the virus indefinitely

See By Holman W. Jenkins, Jr. Excerpts:

"Sewage studies and patient samples seem to show the virus was circulating in Europe and South America before an outbreak was officially recognized in Wuhan.

Lockdowns might or might not have been important contributors to suppressing eruptions that overwhelmed hospitals in the Chinese city, in New York, in Northern Italy. These episodes are not well understood."

"Countries that apparently suppressed Covid with strong measures to keep people apart now are experiencing outbreaks once people no longer find it tolerable or acceptable to be kept apart."

"Supersensitive PCR tests may be identifying widely dispersed viral particles in people who were never infected or who long since got over their infections. We don’t know: This may mean more people have been infected and acquired immunity than we realize, or fewer are infected now than we think because of an oversensitive test."

"even some people who died of gunshot wounds, drug overdoses and motorcycle accidents have been categorized as Covid victims in the U.S."

"Now the country is reportedly giving hundreds of thousands of its people an untested vaccine—which is difficult to explain as a research priority or a public-health priority unless the infection is sufficiently present to allow detection of whether the vaccine is actually effective."