Ever hear about the “wheat and chessboard” problem?<\/p>\n
Take a grain of wheat and put it on a square of a chessboard. Put two grains on the next square. Put four grains on the next square… And so on until you’ve covered the entire 8×8 grid with grains of wheat.<\/p>\n
How many grains of wheat do you have at the end?<\/p>\n
2^64 -1 grains of wheat.<\/p>\n
That is what we call in the IT world, “a shit ton.”<\/p>\n
But first, a digression…<\/p>\n
Bill Gate’s net worth is something like $102 Billion. $102,000,000,000, or $1.02×10^11 in scientific notation.<\/p>\n
Big number, yeah?<\/p>\n
I hear you asking, “How many grains of wheat is that in scientific notation?”<\/p>\n
Excellent question: that’d be 1.844674407×10^19 grains of wheat in scientific notation.<\/p>\n
So, there’s 8 *orders of magnitude* — a billion times — more grains of wheat than the number of dollars in Bill Gate’s rather large piggy bank. It’s a whopping big number.<\/p>\n
COVID-19 has an R0, the basic reproduction number, of between 1.4 and 3.9. For argument’s sake, let’s make that a nice, even 2. This means, for each person infected, they’ll infect two more.<\/p>\n
So, the first person to get it — Patient Zero — infects two more. Those two more infect four more. Four more infect eight more…<\/p>\n
It can take up to two weeks for someone sloughing off viral laden bio-hazards to begin to show symptoms.<\/p>\n
Patient Zero infects two on day two (and doesn’t infect anyone else for the remainder of the outbreak), on day 14, our “grains of wheat” have exposed 2^14 -1 other grains of wheat to COVID-19, or 16,383 people. Our first guy is just *just now* beginning to show symptoms…<\/p>\n
As of Friday, 13 Mar 2020, we have 1,629 confirmed cases of COVID-19.<\/p>\n
That’s between 2 ^ 11 and 2 ^ 12.<\/p>\n
If all these poor people have the SAME Patient Zero, and if my math’s right, that means we’re somewhere around day 12 or 13…<\/p>\n
Unfortunately, we’re not that lucky.<\/p>\n
Remember, the vast majority of the people exposed won’t show symptoms (that is, they’re asymptomatic).<\/p>\n
Aside from hand washing and not touching your face, social isolation is the best way to prevent the further spread of a pandemic.<\/p>\n
So, stay home, have a beer, and quit hoarding toilet paper.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Ever hear about the “wheat and chessboard” problem? Take a grain of wheat and put it on a square of a chessboard. Put two grains on the next square. Put four grains on the next square… And so on until …<\/p>\n