Flatten the Curve9/5/2020 On day 1, no one you know is sick.
It feels like a normal day. It may stay like this for a long time, until one day, a few people you know are sick. And suddenly a few days later, it will seem like everyone is sick, and it will feel like it happened instantly. Everything looks fine, until it isn’t fine. This is the paradox of pandemics, and it’s why with an outbreak like COVID-19 you hear health officials calling for huge, drastic, and rapid responses in the early days when infection numbers are still relatively small. “How bad will the coronavirus outbreak get?” That’s what we all want to know, and the answer is in one of these curves. This is what a rapid global pandemic looks like [Red Curve]. Little to nothing to slow the number of new infections means a lot of people sick in a short amount of time. A slower global pandemic looks like this [Blue Curve]. The rate of new cases is lowered, and they’re spread out over a longer period of time. And which one of these paths we end up on is important because of this line. It represents the capacity of our healthcare system: the number of beds, doctors, respirators, and everything else. What experts fear is a sudden explosion, overwhelming this capacity. And what’s really interesting here is that even if these two curves represent the same total number of people that eventually get infected, in the rapid outbreak scenario more people will die because there won’t be enough hospital beds or ventilators to keep them alive. This is a strange idea. That even if the same number of people eventually get sick in the end, even without a vaccine or a cure, taking drastic action before we see things get bad, that will save lives all on its own. What we’re doing isn’t over-reacting. It’s exactly what the science of epidemics tells us will work. And that’s counterintuitive–it’s something that literally goes against our intuition–because our intuition doesn’t really “get” exponential growth. Instead of thinking about viruses, let’s say you have a pond, and on the pond is a single lily pad. This type of lily pad reproduces once a day, so on day two, you have two lily pads. On day three, you have four, etc. If it takes the lily pads 60 days to cover the pond completely, how long will it take for the pond to be covered halfway? The answer is 59 days. The area covered doubles from half to the whole pond on the last day. But on what day do the lily pads cover a mere 1 percent of the pond? Surprisingly, that doesn’t happen until day 54. The pond is basically empty, until it’s very suddenly not empty. We go from covering less than a percent to covering the whole pond in just the final7 days. This is exponential growth and it’s how pandemics work. We multiply today by some constant to get the value for the next day. That’s why officials are calling for such drastic action so early on, canceling events and school and everything else, before most of us actually know anyone who’s sick. Because with something like this, everything looks fine until it isn’t fine, and if we wait until it’s our turn to get sick, it’s too late. Stay curious. And wash your hands.
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