but he was now a voice in her head—had figured out that each person who got the virus was infecting two to three others. Out of caution, you had to assume a reproductive rate of 3. Every week, the number of infections triples. Do the math and play it out across a California population with zero immunity, and seven weeks from today you’d have 11,809,800 cases. As much as 10 percent or so of those people, more than a million Californians, would need a hospital bed. Half of 1 percent, or a bit more than fifty-nine thousand people, would
