The coronavirus pandemic pits all of humanity against the virus. The damage to health, wealth, and well-being has already been enormous. This is like a world war, except in this case, we’re all on the same side. Everyone can work together to learn about the disease and develop tools to fight it. I see global innovation as the key to limiting the damage. This includes innovations in testing, treatments, vaccines, and policies to limit the spread while minimizing the damage to economies and well-being.
Exponential growth and decline
Exponential growth and decline
In the first phase of the pandemic, we saw an exponential spread in a number of countries, starting with China and then throughout Asia, Europe, and the United States. The number of infections was doubling many times every month. If people’s behavior had not changed, then most of the population would have been infected. By changing behavior, many countries have gotten the infection rate to plateau and start to come down.
Exponential growth is not intuitive. If you say that 2 percent of the population is infected and this will double every eight days, most people won’t immediately figure out that in 40 days, the majority of the population will be infected. The big benefit of the behavior change is to reduce the infection rate dramatically so that, instead of doubling every eight days, it goes down every eight days.
Wow
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