Thread by @gavreilly

Quick thread on social distancing and the degree to which even small gestures are important:

You'll have heard Varadkar say last night that Ireland expects to have 15,000 cases of #covid19 by the end of March - obviously a huge increase compared to the 292 known cases yesterday

The logic behind this is that, based on the experiences of other countries, we can expect the known number of cases to rise by about one-third every day for the next week or two.

When you compound that increase every day for fourteen days, the numbers rise pretty steeply:

These are how the numbers would increase if they keep rising by one-third each day (NB: these are *NOT* my predictions):

T17: 292
W18: 389
T19: 589
F20: 682
S21: 923
S22: 1,230
M23: 1,640
T24: 2,187
W25: 2,916
T26: 3,889
F27: 5,185
S28: 6,913
S29: 9,218
M30: 12,290
T31: 16,387

So you'd have a situation where, two weeks from today, the total number of cases would go from 292 to a hypothetical 16,387 - and even if only a small percentage of those need acute hospital care, the challenge on hospitals is massive.

By comparison, imagine even a *slightly* less aggressive increase - where the number of cases rises by 30% every day instead of 33.3%.

By the end of the same 14-day period, the number of cases would be 11,497 - still a big increase on today, but nearly 5,000 fewer.

To a large extent the increase over the next week is unavoidable - the incubation period means some cases will only show up next week where the virus was actually transmitted last week. So the full impact of the Government measures - school closures, etc - is still a week away.

But equally that might be offset by other things - such as the likes of people returning from Cheltenham who may have caught the virus there, or a certain amount of overspill from Northern Ireland where the same measures were not being pursued at the same time.

For argument's sake that there are 15,000 now-unavoidable cases at the end of this month.

If cases continued to grow at one-third per day, by April 7th there would be 112,373 total cases.

But if the increase is only one-quarter per day: 71,525.

40,000 fewer cases in a week.

That's 40,000 fewer people who would need treatment in the first week of April; thousands fewer people competing for invaluable and finite ICU space; probably hundreds of lives saved.

The cumulative effect of slowed transmissions is just enormous.

Stay home and wash your hands.