This challenging time has required us to shift our typical ways of working for the good of our community. It has also presented us with opportunities to creatively connect.
COVID-19 resources for everyone
Description of the video:
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On day 1, no one you know is sick.
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It feels like a normal day.
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It may stay like this for a long time, until one day, a few people you know are sick.
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And suddenly a few days later, it will seem like everyone is sick, and it will feel like
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it happened instantly.
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Everything looks fine, until it isn’t fine.
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This is the paradox of pandemics, and it’s why with an outbreak like COVID-19 you hear
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health officials calling for huge, drastic, and rapid responses in the early days when
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infection numbers are still relatively small.
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Some people worry these actions are over-reactions.
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Sports teams playing to empty stadiums, or not playing at all.
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Canceling huge gatherings and festivals.
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Temporarily closing schools and offices.
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Telling people to avoid personal contact.
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Media sensationalism.
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All too much, for something that isn’t even a big deal yet.
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But this way of thinking fails to appreciate how disease outbreaks work: It was really
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never fine to begin with, but we don’t notice until it’s too late.
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[MUSIC]
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Hey smart people, Joe here.
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“How bad will the coronavirus outbreak get?”
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That’s what we all want to know, and the answer is in one of these curves.
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This is what a rapid global pandemic looks like.
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Little to nothing to slow the number of new infections means a lot of people sick in a
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short amount of time.
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A slower global pandemic looks like this.
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The rate of new cases is lowered, and they’re spread out over a longer period of time.
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And which one of these paths we end up on is important because of this line.
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It represents the capacity of our healthcare system: the number of beds, doctors, respirators,
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and everything else.
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What experts fear is a sudden explosion like this overwhelming this capacity.
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And what’s really interesting here is that even if these two curves represent the same
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total number of people that eventually get infected, in the rapid outbreak scenario more
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people will die because there won’t be enough hospital beds or ventilators to keep them
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alive.
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This is a strange idea.
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That even if the same number of people eventually get sick in the end, even without a vaccine
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or a cure, taking drastic action before we see things get bad, that will save lives all
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on its own.
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What we’re doing isn’t over-reacting.
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It’s exactly what the science of epidemics tells us will work.
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And that’s counterintuitive–it’s something that literally goes against our intuition–because
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our intuition doesn’t really “get” exponential growth.
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Instead of thinking about viruses, let’s say you have a pond, and on the pond is a
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single lily pad.
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This type of lily pad reproduces once a day, so on day two, you have two lily pads.
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On day three, you have four, et cetera.
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If it takes the lily pads 60 days to cover the pond completely, how long will it take
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for the pond to be covered halfway?
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The answer is 59 days.
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The area covered doubles from half to the whole pond on the last day.
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I bet some of you knew that, though, because you’re pretty smart.
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But on what day do the lily pads cover a mere 1 percent of the pond?
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Surprisingly, that doesn’t happen until day 54.
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The pond is basically empty, until it’s very suddenly not empty.
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We go from covering less than a percent to covering the whole pond in just the final
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7 days.
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This is exponential growth and it’s how pandemics work.
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We multiply today by some constant to get the value for the next day.
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The time doesn’t have to be days, but that’s helpful to use for something like lily pads
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(our constant was 2) or COVID-19.
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Starting in mid-February we’ve seen between 1.1 and 1.4 times more cases each day.
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A number over 1 tells us every day we’re seeing more new cases than the day before.
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You can see the number of total cases starts to add up really fast.
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Exponential growth can be scary.
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But obviously this can’t go on forever and fill the known universe with viruses, for
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a few reasons.
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The virus will either infect everybody, like our lilies filling up the pond, or what actually
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happens is the virus stops finding people to infect: either by running into people who
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are already sick, or we isolate people who are sick, or thanks to something like a vaccine
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spreading resistance in the population.
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But over time the growth rate will naturally slow down, and we end up with a curve for
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the total number of cases that looks like this.
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This is called “logistic growth” and we call this curve a sigmoid, which is a weird
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name, but luckily it starts with “S” which also happens to be the shape of the curve.
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While I was working on this, Grant from 3Blue1Brown released a *really* good video digging into
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more of the math behind why and how this changes, and he’s definitely my go-to when it comes
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to math, so I’ll put a link down below so you can watch that later.
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Now, remember that the height of any point on our S curve tells us how many total cases
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the outbreak has caused as of that day.
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But if we take the slope at that point, that shows how many new cases that day.
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Which makes sense, not many new cases early on, then a whole lot each day, and then not
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many new cases again as the virus dies out or goes quiet.
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If you’ve taken calculus and worked out derivatives before, then you may see where
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I’m going here.
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Plotting the different slopes along our S-shaped curve, we get this.
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This is what health officials are worried could overwhelm our healthcare system.
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But luckily, we can make it look like this instead, if we change how our S curve looks.
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How we do that is by lowering the constant we multiply by from day to day in our exponential
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growth.
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The really important thing here is, for a virus that humans have never encountered before,
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like this one that’s causing COVID-19, no one is immune to it.
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The only way to lower the growth rate, isn’t medicine or anything like that, it’s to
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slow down those infections and keep them from happening in the first place.
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A real outbreak plays out like this: You have a bucket of infectious people, I.
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And you have a bucket of people who haven’t gotten sick yet, S. The I bucket is tied to
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the S bucket so that the more full I is, the faster S empties into it.
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But people are also getting better all the time.
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So the I bucket has a hole in it that empties into a bucket R for recovered people at some
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constant rate.
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So if we can lower how fast S empties into I through some drastic action, I will empty
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out into R, and we’ll stop emptying S. If our bucket of infectious people is empty,
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we starve the virus out.
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So even if we somehow did nothing else to stop a disease outbreak or pandemic, and the
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same total number of people get infected in the end, it is so, so important to slow down
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how many new cases we see every day, to flatten the curve and keep a pandemic from overwhelming
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healthcare.
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In 1918, in the early days of the worst influenza pandemic in history, the city of Philadelphia
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ignored warnings and held a parade attended by 200,000 people.
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Three days later, every bed in Philadelphia’s hospitals was full, and 4,500 people died
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within a week.
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At the same time, St. Louis, two days after detecting the first cases, closed schools,
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playgrounds, even churches.
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Work shifts were changed.
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Public gatherings of more than 20 people were banned.
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And this was the result: A tale of two cities.
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That’s why officials are calling for such drastic action so early on, canceling events
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and school and everything else, before most of us actually know anyone who’s sick.
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Because with something like this, everything looks fine until it isn’t fine, and if we
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wait until it’s our turn to get sick, it’s too late.
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Stay curious.
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And wash your hands.
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We’ll be talking more about that really soon.
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And as always, a huge thank you to everyone who supports the show on Patreon.
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Your support helps us make videos like this faster than we normally could to get good
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information out to people who really, really need it.
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If you'd like to join our community, just check out the link down in the description.
Resources
More resources
- COVID-19: What Older Adults Need to Know
- How canceled events and self-quarantines save lives, in one chart
- When and How to Wash Your Hands
- Why You Shouldn't Sneeze Into Your Sleeve
- Free New England Journal of Medicine COVID-19 Articles
- Health Care Priorities For A COVID-19 Stimulus Bill: Recommendations
- Coronavirus Simulator
- How to flatten the curve
- Find your local foodbank
- Comcast helps people to stay connected
- Food assistance
- How to obtain a stimulus check for those that don't file taxes
- Diapers for those in need
What to do if you think you have COVID-19
Get screened by IU Health's virtual clinic
IU Health has launched a virtual clinic to offer individuals in Indiana regardless of age free coronavirus (COVID-19) screenings using the IU Health Virtual Visit app. Staffed 24/7 with IU Health physicians, advance practice providers and registered nurses, the clinic will screen patients from home, potentially eliminating the need to visit physician offices, urgent cares or emergency departments.