How Many People Are Left Who Haven’t Had Covid-19?

I’m running out of people in my own life.

After avoiding Covid-19 for more than two years — first by isolating and masking, then getting vaxxed and masking, then by getting boosted and moving on with my life — I finally contracted Covid-19 last June. About a month after that, the President of the United States got Covid, and a study estimated that, by that point, 82 percent of Americans had contracted Covid-19. We’ve gone through more peaks and valleys since then — and it’s totally understandable, even sane, if you’ve stopped paying attention to case rates — and according to The New York Times Covid Tracker, we’ve had an average of 42,000 new cases per day over the last week. There is reason to believe that number is low: I personally know several people who have tested positive over the last fortnight and not only didn’t report to any sort of health authority that they were positive, they weren’t even sure how to, or if they were supposed to.

Actually, I really know two of those people: They’re my parents. Up until Thanksgiving weekend, neither of them had ever had Covid-19. (As far as they knew.) But this week, their number came up. Now, my parents are both in their early 70s, and they’re both healthy, active and fully vaccinated: I feel very fortunate that they were only sick for a couple of days and are already on the mend: My dad now feels close to 100 percent and is mostly annoyed that he keeps testing positive. But still: They tested positive. It’s always scary when someone you love tests positive.

And among the people closest to me — my wife, my two sons and my parents, all of whom live in the same town — they are nearly the only people left. My wife and younger son Wynn had Covid-19 in December 2020, before they had access to a vaccine, the scariest time. I had it in June 2022. My parents have now had it. Only my older son William, who just turned 11, has skated by. And even that’s a little bit of a guess: We haven’t entirely ruled out the possibility that his mother and brother may have gotten it from an-unsymptomatic him in the first place, two years ago.

Like most people, I’ve done what I can to keep myself and the people I care about safe during the now-nearly-three-years-long pandemic. Also like most people, I’ve become less militant as we’ve all gotten vaccinated and tried to return to some semblance of normal. And now my parents have tested positive. Again: I’m grateful that they’re recovering, and through the worst of it (which was, as my dad put it, “bad, but not that bad. But still bad”). But it’s still scary.

I think back to the way historians talked about the 1918 Flu, how overpowering and destructive it was, how that term, before 2020, was considered the most horrifying modern pandemic possible. But that one infected only one out of every three people on the planet. This one has surpassed that one, dramatically … and we have a lot more people on this planet now than we did in 1918. The 1918 Flu was something everyone on earth dealt with but only one-third of the population had. It sure looks like Covid-19 is going to get to just about everybody at some point. It makes you appreciate just how incredible modern medicine is … and, in the end, as China is learning, just how little power we had to keep Covid-19 in the first place. We staved off the best we could until vaccines got here. As I see my parents feeling better, through the worst of it, I’m almost sort of proud of us that we did.

I’ll confess that my older son is starting to look pretty nervous these days, though.

Will Leitch writes multiple pieces a week for Medium. Make sure to follow him right here. He lives in Athens, Georgia, with his family and is the author of five books, including the Edgar-nominated novel How Lucky, now out from Harper Books. He also writes a free weekly newsletter that you might enjoy.