Thread on shocking exponential growth, yet still fails to understand exponential growth.

If your small interventions fail to stop growth, ~everyone is infected anyway. Then your small intervention has a small effect, because herd immunity is an approximately linear equation. https://twitter.com/dsymetweets/status/1246933275093938182

This is why widely contagious pandemics usually have binary outcomes: either everyone who can be infected, is infected, or approximately no-one is infected.

SARS could be stopped, and infected 10,000 people.

H1N1 couldn't, and infected 1,000,000,000 people.

Similarly in communities where it's possible to spread HIV it's shockingly common: estimated ~5% in people who inject drugs in North America, even w/ aggressive efforts to stop it.

Outside at-risk communities, R0 was pushed <1 via safe sex, testing, etc. and ~no-one has it.

This is why in theory the best strategy to stop a disease like COVID-19 is to do *really* strict lockdown, as strict as you possibly can. And if that doesn't work/isn't possible, best strategy may be to give up and get it over with quickly.

But not very politically palatable. :/