Re:3.28M file for U.S. jobless benefits
by ImaCake on Thursday March 26, 2020 @03:53PM
(#22697244)
People just dont get exponentials. They don't understand that if you get a total of a million cases in a week's time, most of those cases appear on day 6. They can't see how 1/7th of those cases turns into a million. Every country should be hoping that whoever calls the shots understands math.
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| on HN ]
People just don’t get sigmoids. They don’t understand that herd immunity quickly starts to slow the local spread of a virus in a region, and that you can’t model the entire population of a country like bouncy balls in a box. Every country should be hoping that whomever calls the shots understands math better than the average HN commenter.
This might be a logistic curve in the long term. But if this runs wild it will look like an exponential for a while longer. If your doubling time is 3 and a bit days. You can't just sit back saying "the inflexion point is coming any day now!". You need to do something yesterday.