A few years ago, I was talking to a physicist friend of mine, and he had a theory. That theory was that humans fundamentally had trouble understanding the impact of exponential functions, and that contributed to a great many societal problems. Population growth, climate change, inflation … all these are examples of exponential functions, albeit with different exponents.
So, too, is COVID-19, and with a much higher exponent than my three previous examples. Back in the before times of last winter, one thing that made the threat hard to grasp was the non-intuitive math: It wasn’t immediately obvious that if the average COVID-19 carrier infects two other people within a week, the number can very quickly race spectacularly out of control. Model that out, unchecked, and it takes just a few months to go from one case to 368 million, which is the entire population of the U.S. and Canada.
Epidemiology, at its root, is a math problem. It’s one the NBA…
