Isaac Chotiner writes in the New Yorker that after a month of social-distancing measures in the U.S., researchers know more about the dynamics of the pandemic, but the details about mortality and immunity remain unclear.
Justin Lessler, a professor of epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, models disease transmission, and has been studying the novel coronavirus. A month ago, as the first confirmed covid-19 deaths were occuring in the United States, I spoke with Lessler about some of the early findings about the disease. On Tuesday, I called Lessler again, to ask him how our understanding of covid-19 has evolved in the past month, and how epidemiologists have changed their views of the pandemic’s likely effects. In our latest conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed what we know about whether people who have been infected are now immune, the hope that warm summer weather will halt the disease’s spread, and why testing remains the only way to prevent further rounds of mass quarantines.