"[Y]ou have 15 people, and the 15 within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero." Here comes a thread on COVID, scaling, and switching tactics to defeat the virus. whitehouse.gov/briefings-stat…
In late February, more than a month after the first COVID case was confirmed, the Whitehouse told the world "We have contained this virus." politico.com/news/2020/02/2…
They were wrong for many reasons but one of the key stumblers for the WH and for most people in the US was the failure to grasp the notion of non-linear growth. (cue instructional video...)
Most humans are pretty good at estimating growth on a linear (straight-line) trajectory. For example, if I told you we startd with 1000 cases and added 1000 cases per day, after ten days you can proly guess we'd have 10k cases. See the graph's straight line. 
But if I told you we start with 1000 cases and were doubling our cases each day what do you estimate our total after ten days? if you said 1 million, you'd be correct. Note the curve in this non-linear growth. That's how viruses work.
We have examples of non-linear growth all around us. Many jobs depend upon it. Gates, Bezos, Zuckerberg, and others are all billionaires because they exploit non-linear growth. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram all depend on non-linear growth to help make their content "go viral."
LinkedIn Founder Ried Hoffman helped write an entire book called "BlitzScaling" on how Silicon Valley entrpreneurs can leverage non-linear growth to get rich (blitzscaling.com)
And that really bugs me. We have all these smart people who know how to essentially "manage viruses" and I don't see any of them applying thier non-linear understanding to beating COVID-19.
Instead I see too many linear solutions. The US project Warp Speed is a "big bet" attempt to create dozens of vaccine in hopes that one or two are a success. Big Bets are unlikely to beat non-linear growth.
sciencemag.org/news/2020/05/d…
sciencemag.org/news/2020/05/d…
Drug companies are rushing to find medicine to speed and improve recovery for VOCID-infected patience. Some are trying to build better/cheaper ventilators and masks. State governments are working to add more hospital beds, medical staff, and PPE. -- all linear solutions.
When you're fighting a non-linear enemy, applying linear solutions is the same as bringing a knife to a gun fight; bringing a pill to a pandemic. We need a better approach. The daily case graph belows shows us falling behind, losing the war, day-bay-day.
Amway knows how this works. Get two people to buy your product and then they each get two people, and those people get two people, and so on and so on.
We need to "scale out" anti-COVID actions. Make mask-wearing "go viral." Make staying away from enclosed, noisy, poorly-ventilated places "cool." Make risky behavior "uncool."
If you get two people to wear masks and they get two people... If you get a promise from your friends not to enter risky locations and they get *their* friends to agree... See a spike in cases? *Double* your contact tracing. That's non-linear scaling.
Online companies know that they can improve "virality" by making it easy to spread their product to others. We should be doing that, too. We can't keep *adding* resources, we have to keep *doubling* them.
People at Twitter and Instagram, billionaires like Gates and Bezos, they know how to engage in non-linear thinking. So do many others around the world.
Richard Thaler's Nudge Theory offers lots of possible applications to adjust behavior and create viral spread of solutions. phys.org/news/2020-06-n…
We need to unleash our own forms non-linear disruption of COVID-19. We need to design new "viruses" to defeat this COVID pandemic.
Think like a virus! When you see linear solutions, call them out as inadequate. When you see someone using non-linear thinking, encourage and support them. We can win this war when we meet the enemy head-on with the proper weapons and the right thinking.
@threadreaderapp unroll, please.
