I’ve been hesitating to write a full column on what I call “the current plague.”

The news is already full of it. I’ve decided, though, I have a few things novel to say about what is called the “novel” virus.

A lot of people still don’t know a certain critical fact even though it has been repeated many times, or maybe they know it but haven’t thought out the implications.

It is this. The virus (SARS-CoV-2) can infect a second person as early as 14 days before the original, the first, infected person is even aware of their own infection.

With other diseases, even the most obvious and grave ones, we know when people are infected. It’s when they show the features, the characteristic symptoms of the disease.

Take the scary disease Ebola. Its frightening character permitted then-citizen Donald Trump to wave it around in an effort to discredit then-President Barack Obama in 2014.

A person cannot transmit Ebola to another until they show symptoms. It’s obvious they’ve got something terrible as the symptoms develop. We stand back and might even run away when we realize they can infect us. That has actually happened in a few places. As a result, Ebola can’t easily grow into a pandemic. The infected die too quickly. Potential infected people make themselves scarce.

This is not so with COVID-19. If we just had a test available, we all would know and take measures. Instead, we might hang out with an infected person for days before they sicken, giving us no chance to retreat.

Now we have a test, but it is not generally available to us. This is slowly changing, but there is roadblock after roadblock and critical shortages. Our ignorance of how many and where there are infections has already done a lot of damage.

Pandemics have a natural course. With COVID-19, we just don’t know what it is. Neither does the virus know, this being its first go around.

I guess I can personalize the virus if Trump thinks he can order it stopped by Easter.

Epidemiologists believe that absent our successful intervention, this plague will grow faster and faster until it comes to a sharp maximum (called the “inflection point” or peak on a chart). Then it will decline, but how high the peak will be and whether the decline will be followed by a second peak is unknown.

Why not let just this happen? Let it wash over the population and cull the old and already infirm while spreading immunity to much of the population? Then we can get back doing what’s important like putting the stock market in place. That’s what some Republican leaders and Fox News talking heads propose.

I won’t comment on the ethics or morality of this view. Let me talk about practical matters.

The dominant perspective, especially including those in the medical sphere, is that we should try to flatten the peak in the sickness curve.

A high, sharp peak will flood medical care facilities and personnel with far more sick than they can handle. The result is many more people get sick, disabled or die than with a gentler slope with a lower peak. Heart attack victims, accidents and pregnancies will also suffer with medical care space contested. Continuing medical treatments like cancer therapy and kidney dialysis will be disrupted or end.

Not only will more average Americans die, so will more medical caregivers sicken. Not enough news stories have been done about this, but we do not want a generation of medical practitioners decimated.

Taking more time for the peak to arrive will also allow time to develop, find or manufacture drugs to combat the virus and for us to prepare. The president’s recent unscripted announcement based on slight evidence that several old line generic drugs might cure the infection simply caused them to quickly disappear from pharmacies to be held in reserve somewhere and stranding those with ongoing medical use of them.

One of the most frequent kinds of pandemic denial is to compare COVID-19 to the seasonal outbreak of influenza.

It is commonly said we don’t panic every winter when the flu spreads across the land. People die then — 10,000, 20,000, 30,000 (you fill in the number). So, what is the big deal about COVID-19?

Well, it’s a new virus that very recently jumped from bats to humans. Latest research shows an existing coronavirus in bats had two small mutations in late November. One made it so the virus grew a protein spike (a furin). It looks kind of like broccoli. With the spike the virus can now penetrate the body’s defenses to get at our throat and lung cells.

There is too much we don’t know about COVID-19. For example, will the pandemic decline or end when the weather warms?

Will the virus mutate again into something worse? Studies in mainland China put the mortality rate at 1.4 to 2.3 percent for already hospitalized patients. Recent figures for hospitalized patients in the U.S. is over 4 percent.

Italy has the highest mortality rate and nearby Germany probably the lowest. Why these differences? Does each country have a different viral strain, or, more likely, is it the result of differences in age, the health care system, the statistical reporting and other non-viral variations? Right now, surveillance shows the virus is not becoming more infectious or deadly.

The overall mortality rate for seasonal influenza in the United States is 0.1 percent of hospitalized people. So the incomplete statistics tell us that as a viral infection it is from a little to a lot more deadly than the flu virus infection.

The flu, however, has killed many more people overall each year. Skeptics make much of this, but the flu has a long track record. COVID-19 has been killing people outside China for just a couple weeks. So, of course, stupid, the total deaths are much less, but it is ramping up fast. Will it soon reach its peak, or will it become a year round menace?

The is also the question of how infectious is the coronavirus? Since the population has no immunity the answer is, likely, very infectious. There is no herd immunity. The best answer for the flu is an average of 8 percent of the U.S. population gets sick from it annually. The range is 3 to 11 percent.

The estimates I have seen for the coronavirus are from 20 to 70 percent of us will eventually get it. Ouch!

I wrote this on Thursday, March 26. That’s the day U.S. virus deaths passed 1,000. Total infections were 81,321. What will it be on Sunday, March 29? How about Easter Sunday, April 12?

Dr. Ralph Maughan of Pocatello is a professor emeritus of political science at Idaho State University. He retired after teaching there for 36 years and specializing in elections and public opinion, congressional politics, and the politics of natural resources. He has written three backcountry outdoor guides, including “Hiking Idaho” with his wife Jackie Johnson Maughan. He has been president or chair of numerous conservation organizations.