The base sits in the flat Temecula valley, where the steady wind whips over the mountains and west to the sea. The sun muscles its way into every corner of the earth, the landcape pock-marked with palm trees that line the highway. When the evacuees arrived, the National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases, a division of the CDC, screened them again (although they don’t actually have real coronavirus tests. Only the CDC in Atlanta has those tests. One can only hope that the staff were wearing adequate protections). Workers with the Administration for Children and Families, a unit within Human and Health Services, will help them settle into the base today, making sure everyone has a shower and a clean towel, offering books to children and hot coffee to adults. From there the passengers can decide whether to remain in quarantine for three days or travel home, where they will self-monitor for an additional fourteen days. It sounds rough, but compared to the lockdown the Wuhan authorities have invoked, it is a light sentence.

The key word to learn is “comorbidity”—meaning the conditions one already has (like diabetes and heart disease) that make it much harder to overcome disease. Eleven of the seventeen people that died had comorbidities. One had cirrhosis of the liver, which probably means he was a heavy drinker. One man had aortosclerosis, the plaque buildup inside the large blood vessel that feeds the heart, often a result of diabetes, high blood pressure, smoking, or obesity. Hypertension is another frequent comorbidity.

My father, who was an epidemiologist working in East Africa in the 1960s and 70s, used to say that some viruses “culled” populations, weeding out the weak, elderly, and infirm. He talked constantly about how social and economic factors play a huge role in determining who in the population would develop comorbidities and the susceptibility for disease. He eventually moved to preventative medicine, preaching the gospel that the only way to stop disease was to build social structures that prevented people from developing comorbidities. He moved from a position as epidemiological consultant for the UN to become a lowly general practitioner in a small town in the Deep South in the mid-1970s because he wanted to care for a community, and practice what he preached. It is terrifying to think what this virus could do to a country that seems to have forgotten these simple lessons.