If the Zika virus comes to the United States, we could face the threat of the same sort of virgin soil epidemic—an infection arriving in a population that has never been exposed to it before—that has caused more than 1 million known infections, and probably several million asymptomatic ones, in Central and South America. It’s nerve-wracking to wonder what that would be like: How many people would fall ill, how serious the effects would be in adults or in babies, and most important, how good a job we would do of protecting ourselves.

But, in fact, we can guess what it would be like. Because we have a good example, not that long ago, of a novel mosquito-borne threat that caused