Most People Have Probably Had Covid-19

The complex answer to an important question

Pictured: People. Blurry, blurry people. Photo by mauro mora on Unsplash

Since the start of the pandemic, there have been innumerable important questions. Epidemiologists briefly became, if not celebrities, then at least familiar faces that you occasionally saw on TV — thankfully, we’ve now mostly retreated behind the closed doors to our lovely spreadsheets — simply because we were the ones who knew the most about what was happening at any point in time.

Among that heady wash of information, there has been often no question as important as the simple “how many people have already had Covid-19?”. And somehow, even now, we have no good answer to that question.

Pictured: Disease. Cute, fluffy disease. Photo by Kristine Wook on Unsplash

The reason this question is so vital is fairly obvious. If you’ve had Covid-19, you have some immunity to the disease, and that’s important for a whole range of reasons, but despite that we still have had trouble getting a convincing answer. I wrote about this at the start of 2021 , and while the issues have shifted, they are still very much real.

However, even thought the precise number of people who’ve been infected with SARS-CoV-2 is something of a mystery, we can say with a…