Ok, so I want to put this in people's heads. I think a lot of people are being cavalier about all of this because they don't understand how exponential calculations work. So, here are some examples.
Take a chess board with 64 squares. If you put a penny on the first square and then double it on each subsequent square (2, 4, 8, 16 etc.) most people would think you would have a few bucks by the end. Nope. You would end up with a total of 18,446,744,073,709,551,615 pennies. That's 184.5 quadrillion dollars (or 184,467,440 billion). That's about 8.5 times the entire GDP of the United States.
Now, let's look at that from the perspective of a pandemic. In the case of covid-19, it took 3 months to reach 100,000 cases worldwide. It then took 12 DAYS to double to 200,000 cases. It took just 5 days to double again, to 400,000 cases. Now you can start to see how this is going.
To put it plainly, that means when you go out side, you have the potential to infect 2 other people (it's higher than that but I wanted to keep it simple). But it doesn't end there. You are also responsible for the two people EACH that they infect, so now your total is 6. You are then responsible for the two people each of them infects and so on (14, 30, 58, 122 etc.) Do you see how quickly that number grows? Does that make it clearer?
This does not mean panic, it means be smart. No, the world is not ending. That doesn’t mean that this isn’t a crisis, or some plot to keep us all locked up in our homes.
Now let’s put another spin on this, the mortality rate. When people say the virus ONLY has a 3% mortality rate, they don’t realize the staggering implications of that. If only 30% of the worlds population gets the virus (and that is the low end of the estimates, if people self isolate), that still means that over 2 BILLION people will be infected. That means 63 million deaths worldwide.