There are lots of sites that track the coronavirus, COVID-19. One of my favorites is the one put together by Johns Hopkins. There is lots of data there, but the chart that scares me the most is buried in the bottom right corner of the site. The default view shows the actual number of cases reported from mainland China, from the rest of the world, and then, more hopefully, the number of people who have fully recovered.
It's a good chart but not the one that frightens me. You have to click the little tab that says "logarithmic" to get to the one that makes my hair a little more grey. If you then turn off the "Mainland China" button and the "Total Recovered" button, you get the chart that sends me running for Purel and a face mask. You can see what it looks like at the top of the page.
It shows the number of cases worldwide outside of China. What makes it so frightening is that it is a logarithmic scale. That means that the Y-axis doesn't increase by equal steps. Instead, each increase represents a ten-fold increase in whatever you are measuring. In other words, you aren't counting 1, 2, 3. You are counting 10, 100, 1000.
If you mouse over the yellow dots you can see the dates certain milestones were hit. For example, the world hit 100 (10 X 10) cases (plus a few) outside of China on January 29, 2020. See the picture below:
Then, only 13 days after that, we hit 10,000 cases (10 X 10 X 10 X 10):
Unchecked, this implies that there will likely be 100,000 cases outside of China by about March 17, 2020 and--here's the shocker--a million cases by the end of the month. You can do the math after that.
Unchecked. That's the operative word in the last sentence. China got to about 80,000 cases before they managed to turn the corner. To get there meant taking extreme measures (like closing down a city larger than New York).
It's hard for me to imagine it getting that bad, that quickly, but that's what scares me--the math don't lie.
