Thread by @ASlavitt

COVID Update July 25: Right now in this crisis, good or bad is less important than early or late.

If saving lives is important to your mayor & governor, they need to be early to action. 1/

Acting to close bars & require masks BEFORE hospital beds fill is a bit like wearing a condom. It’s more effective before the act.

2/

(Don’t be concerned. I won’t be taking that analogy any further.) 3/

People talk about R (the reproductive rate of the virus), but I like to boil it down to something simple. I call it “Zach’s math.”#Zachsmath

Zach is my #inthebubble co-host. Also he’s our 18 year old son (on the left). 4/

One day in early March, when the reproductive rate was 2.3, I asked him how many people would 1 person be responsible for infecting after 10 generations (a generation is about 5 days— so call it 2 months.

Zach looked at me as if I wasn’t very smart as he often does. 5/

4142 he said, explaining the common algebra to me.

Ok smarty. What if the R goes to 1.3?

13.8.

That can’t be right I said, proving his assessment of me correct.

How about 3.3?

153,157

He and his high school brain (& calculator) left me with my jaw open. 6/

So, Zach, I said seizing back the expert mantle of a father. If you’re asymptomatic and just going about your life & infect the average number of people, in 2 months you would be responsible for 4100 infections.

He was doing an excellent job hiding how impressed he was. 7/

So I continued. Let’s say the death rate was 1/2 of 1%. So you would unknowingly create 20 deaths. And if you stayed home or wore a mask you could save 20 lives.

He nodded & threw me a goldfish. 8/

But if you’re careful— wear a mask or stay home— and infect 1.3, you’ve still infected 14 people which is bad but not nearly as bad.

And Zach if you go to a party or a bar & get crazy, you alone can be responsible for 150,000 infections.

And 3000 deaths, I know dad. 9/

A cloth mask if warn uniformly is assumed to reduce r by 30%. So let’s say R was 1 where it is now many places. At 0.7, cases don’t grow but they shrink.

Here’s how. Say there are 1000 cases in a community. In 10 generations there would only be 28 cases entirely!10/

From @NPR

(For those of you home schooling, this thread is officially sanctioned as a math lesson. If you’re creative enough, I think you can get a week or two out of variations of this analysis. Good luck.) 11/

I don’t know a single act that I can do that would save 20 people’s lives.

Every day you put on a mask, think to yourself, “I rock. I may be saving 20 people’s moms or dads today alone.”

This is how I think about #Zachsmath. 12/

If you’re a mayor or governor, multiply that by the people in your town or state. How often does a governor get to save that many lives? Or a mayor?

Look what happens with the early birds! 13/

What that basically says is “go early and things get better early.” And if you’re better early then you cut into #Zachsmath.

In March, when they each hit 1000 cases, NY waited 6 more days before acting than CA. And ended up with 10x the cases. 14/

One of the challenges with being early is it doesn’t let you off the hook. It doesn’t end until the crisis ends.

You don’t get to take May off because you did a good job in April. 15/

As @NateSilver538 shared with me, there are too many unknown variables. As CA found out, after doing many things right, their farm labor camps became a major source of spread growing the food we eat.

Listen to him or many other views here. Smarties.it/inthebubble 16/

There lies the problem with all of this. All this is hard to sustain. It’s hard on all of us. It’s hard on our businesses. It’s hard on our incomes.

And going too early makes sustaining it more difficult. 17/

So what’s the trick? Same as it always is.

Get to a low case count. Then test & contact trace. Without that, we are in this endless cycle we’re in now. Good-bad-good-bad-open-close-open. 18/

If we’ve learned anything by now it’s that re/opening early is just as bad as starting late. For the same reason. 3 weeks of bliss & then #Zachsmath.
19/

floridapolitics.com/archives/35212…

Opening a brewery for 2 months on the hope that maybe there will then be a vaccine or some positive change has a lot of appeal. Not closing down until it gets bad has a lot of appeal.

But then again, I point to the earlier analogy. 20/

Abbott is bragging about how hospital beds have gone down a couple days in a row while bragging about how Texas is ready to open for business. 21/

In many states it turns out, high school math doesn’t prevail.

In Florida, the only way to communicate with the state about life & death is to talk about the impact on tourism.

They care about #Floridamath. 22/

Whatever it takes to get off the sidelines. I took my package of testing contact tracing, and bar closing recommendations and without changing a word, re-titled it “Tourism 2020 plan.” 😂😂😂😂 23/

At this point in time we’ve already seen it. It’s no mystery. The bars will close. Masks will be needed. It’s not if but when.

Make when now. At least per Zach. /end