Coronavirus Chronicles 2: The Curse of the Exponential
What will happen if we do nothing
Trigger Warning: What I show here can be extremely anxiety-inducing. My intention is not to stoke fear, pessimism or despair, but to offer a rational way of thinking about this epidemic.
Exponential processes can be deceiving. They start gradually so it looks like things are going to develop slowly, but all of a sudden things seem to explode and everything gets out of control. Our mind tends to assume that things change linearly and are quite unprepared to confront exponential processes. Unfortunately, epidemics are exponential phenomena until herd immunity or vaccination puts a brake on their development.
This is an exercise in mathematical modeling to answer a few basic questions about the coronavirus epidemic in the USA:
1. How long will it take until things get bad?
2. How many people are likely to get infected?
3. How many people are likely to die?
An important caveat: this model assumes that we do nothing to control the epidemic or that whatever we do has little effect on its spread. However, China and South Korea have been quite successful in curtailing the epidemic, so we know that this is possible.
