“The moment you started prepping for the coronavirus crisis is now perhaps the hottest credential in Silicon Valley,” she writes.

Tech creators are practiced in hunting for opportunities in disruption, and are busy doing so now. But with so much of what remains of the American economy accruing to their services, from fitness trackers to streaming to delivery apps, they also see a new danger, Nellie writes: greater inequality that could lead to revolution-level social strife.

Are more cases good news? Not really.

The Times Opinion columnist David Leonhardt writes:

My first reaction to the news that the coronavirus seems to have spread more widely than initially understood — potentially to 20 percent of New York City residents, for example — was optimism.

If more people have had the virus, it means that its death rate is lower. That’s just math. We have a decent idea of how many people have died from the virus. If the total pool of people who have had it is larger than the early estimates suggested, the chances that any individual patient will die from it are, by definition, smaller — closer to about 0.5 percent on average, instead of 3 or 4 percent, as initially seemed possible.

But as I spent some time talking to public health experts this week, my optimism faded. The new statistics still suggest that the overall death toll could be catastrophic, and on the high end of the range of the various statistical models.

How could that be? There are two main reasons.

One, the fact that more people may have already had the virus also suggests that it’s more contagious than the initial numbers suggested — that any one person with the virus tends to pass it to a greater number of others. And if it’s more contagious, it may be harder to contain in coming months. As society begins to reopen, the virus could spread more quickly. The number of Americans who get it before a vaccine is developed would then be larger.