I’ve been worrying about the novel coronavirus for nearly a month, for most of which time people seemed to think I was kind of nuts and overblowing the situation.  Obviously, the tide has turned on that in the last few days, with government-mandated shutdowns, and people buying out entire supermarkets as they prepare to hunker down in social distancing mode.

Still, I don’t think measures have gone nearly far enough.  And, given how spectacularly we’ve also dropped the ball on testing, I don’t think people really understand how bad things are about to get, nor for how long.

Part of that is a limitation of human brains: we’re terrible at emotionally understanding math, especially when it involves exponential growth.

Take the famous birthday paradox: how many people do you need to have in a room before there’s a better than 50% chance that two of them have the same birthday?  Most people guess about 180 people – about half the number of days in the year.  In fact, the answer is 23.  In a room of 23 people, there’s a 50-50 chance that two of them have the same birthday.  And in a room of 75 people, the odds are 99.9%.  Which, even after you’ve learned the underlying math, just doesn’t seem to make any intuitive sense.

So, in talking with people about this pandemic, I’ve often fallen back on the metaphor of lilypads in a pond: imagine that you have a big pond, with a single lilypad in it on the first day.  On the second day, it doubles to two lilypads.  Then to four lilypads the day after.  On the 100th day, the pond is entirely covered with lilypads.  When is the pod 50% covered?  Despite the simplicity of the math, surprisingly few people seem to realize it’s the 99th day.  And almost all are shocked to learn that, on the 95th day, the pond is only about 3% covered.

All of which is to say, when things are growing exponentially, they get bigger much faster than we expect.  So, even having thought a bunch about this all, and even understanding in the mathematic abstract what’s likely coming our way, I was still more than a bit shaken by this chart I recently stumbled across:

Pair that with a recent video showing what those numbers mean in terms of newspaper obituaries:

Graphs are useful but to really get what that rising curve is, have a look at the obituaries page of this Bergamo daily newspaper, comparing one from February with one from now pic.twitter.com/78mgZseyVt

— Ben Phillips (@benphillips76) March 14, 2020

Between the two, I’m definitely not feeling great about the next few weeks.