COVID math

I recently read the Leonard Pitts opinion piece where he calls people “stupid” or “goobers” for not following the stay at home/social distancing orders. I don’t think people are stupid, just not well-informed as to why this is so important.

Let’s take three different scenarios. We’ll assume that there are 100 people infected today and each person is contagious for three days.

In the first scenario, if every infectious person infects two other people, then in 60 days, there will be over 105 million active infections on day 60, 210 million total infections over the 60 days and over 2 million deaths. This is the exponential growth that the experts are talking about.

In the second scenario, we’ll assume that each person infects only 1 other person. In this case there would only be 100 active infections on day 60, 2,100 total infections, and about 200 deaths. This is the linear growth or the flattening of the curve that they talk about.

In the last scenario, let’s assume that each person only infects on average 0.9 other people. In this case, at the end of 60 days, there will only be 12 active infections on day 60, about 900 total infections, and less than 10 deaths.

This isn’t politics, partisanship, Republican, Democrat, Independent – it’s just simple math that cannot be argued. It also explains why the models that you hear about can change so rapidly. The Spokesman needs to do a better job explaining why things happen as they do.

Kevin R. Oldenburg

Spokane Valley