Well, I studied the mathematics of this in university in a class, and (like everything else) it stuck with me.

But I think you’re missing the gravity of the situation. If COVID-19 occurred sporadically like the seasonal flu, no one would care. But it isn’t — the cases are growing exponentially.

If we can’t find a way to delay a majority of the serious cases, we are going to completely overwhelm our medical system.

This would mean a period of about one to two months where for every hospital bed, there will be five to ten desperately ill people; for every ventilator, there will be five to ten people who need it to live.

This would kill a lot of doctors and nurses, who will be working 100+ hour weeks. Far more will get sick and be unable to work. Many others would become so psychologically traumatized from seeing hundreds of deaths, including people they knew, that they would have several PTSD and be unable to function as medical professionals.

And of course, if you showed up at the hospital with a regular, common old heart attack or car accident, something you’d usually survive every time if you made it to the hospital alive, you would probably die, because there are just not enough people to help you. And if you had some chronic but manageable disease, ditto. Or if you were being treated for a serious but treatable disease, ditto.

Italy had one of the best medical systems in the world, with far better outcomes than the US (for most medical conditions) and many more beds per million people. Now they are being forced to allow people to die simply from lack of medical care.

You know how fast you accelerate if you fall off a building? That’s constant acceleration. In exponential growth, the acceleration is increasing — in fact it’s increasing exponentially.

In the US, the number of cases is doubling every six days and that doubling time is getting smaller. Today there are 26,000 cases; that means next Saturday there will be 52,000, the Friday after that 104,000, and this number will keep doubling, only slowing when a sizable portion of the population has it.

Best estimates of the mortality rate of COVID-19 are around 1% (as opposed to 0.1% for the common flu), and about 60% of the population will get it (as opposed to 5–20% for the flu, depending on the year.

This means that if the virus doesn’t completely overload and break the medical system, we should expect very very roughly two million deaths in the US — that is, about 40 years worth of flu deaths, or about 5 times as many Americans as died in World War 2, except in less than a year.

This is the good outcome. This is about the best we can hope for — a bunch of WW2 level casualties coming at the same time.

If it does overload the medical system… who knows how many would die? Just to take one example, the US hospital system gets about 2 million trauma patients a year, mostly accidents, and almost all of them survive. The whole “trauma center” thing was invented in our lifetimes — before then, over 95% of trauma patients died. If the hospitals broke down, we’d expect to go back to those numbers again.

If the US hospital system breaks down, I would rather not even speculate how many would die in total.

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Now, we might be lucky.

There are several wildcards that might protect us. We know the disease is very partial to some genetic groups over others. In Italy, some families were ravaged with no apparent exposure to the disease, others were completely spared. Germany is showing much better results than other places for a reason no one has figured out — that might be genetic too.

It might mutate into a more infectious, but much less fatal version that outraces the fatal one — so we all get the baby version first and have antibodies for the nasty one.

But the downside of not getting lucky are so huge that it’s worth spending all the money. Hoping for good luck here is like expecting your lottery win to pay your rent.

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This is not rocket science. Humans have literally thousands of years’ experience with epidemics. The people who plan for this know the same math that I do, and that’s why they’re terrified.