This is NORMAL for a virgin field epidemic which is airborne transmissible. Those NEVER hit in only one big wave and then vanish. There are always multiple waves of infection in any airborne-transmissible epidemic.
Even then virgin field airborne-transmissible epidemics never reach everyone or anything close to everyone. I'm not aware of even a majority of a given large population, outside the confines of a besieged city, ever coming down with any disease ever.
The Spanish Flu is instructive. 500 million of the 1400 million people in the world caught it (35.7%) over a period of about a year, in three big waves. About a third of all Americans did. IMO the Wuhan Virus seems to be at least as contagious as the Spanish Flu, and perhaps a bit more so. I'd put it at about 35% +/- 5% for the moment.
Reality is like that.
"The single point almost everyone is missing: the Infected rate is going to eventually be 100%. This is a novel virus. Not one person in the world has a natural immunity to this. No body, on earth, has faced this before this pandemic."
I’m curious: was the Spanish flu the first flu pandemic, or were there other versions before that. If there were previous flus, some folks might have had a partial immunity, making the virus’ ability to spread more difficult.
You probably have antibodies to H1N1.
That’s the Spanish flu.
Nice story though.
The DP was not the petri dish you think it was.
The people were not all huddled in the Grand Ballroom hacking on each other. They were in separate cabins with separate facilities in different zones of the ship and practiced isolation, social distancing and prophylactics such as wearing masks. Some of the sick were removed from the ship, another form of isolation.
If we could get a breakdown of where in the ship the infected were, I would be willing to bet that some areas were heavily affected while others were not affected at all.