Colm O'Regan IT’S A GRIM daily ritual. Waiting for the numbers of new cases. The increase is nearly always bigger now. There is a powerlessness associated with it.
Put in Friday’s total, 683. Pretend new daily cases arrive in from now on at that same rate. Multiply it by 1.22 as a guess of what it might be today. Multiply the answer again by 1.22. Do that another six times. So by a week’s time, we could have 2,748 cases if we carried on at the same rate. You’ll hear on the news that the virus is growing exponentially. It means a thing is growing over time at a rate that’s proportional to the size of the thing itself. The more people have it, the faster others will get it. You see exponential growth in the compound interest, in your savings account but the rate of growth is so tiny you might as well put it under your mattress. How we’d only love a virus that grew at a deposit rate right now.
It’s a far advanced level of the maths we did in school but there is still a direct line from Folens New Complete Mathematics algebra to here. The last equations some of us might have done in school were simple: “What kind of a thing do we get if you square a thing, add four times the thing and add another fifteen?”.
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