Folding paper is weirdly like the coronavirus
Imagine I have a piece of A4 paper.
Now what if I folded it in half? And then, I folded it again? How many times do you think I can fold this piece of paper?
Six times! That’s all I managed. I know, it’s pathetic isn’t it?
A man on a YouTube channel managed to do it seven times with a hydraulic press. The paper practically disintegrated on the eighth fold. The world record is 12, achieved by a high school student (although she used tissue paper).
It’s pretty unimpressive. So why can we achieve so few folds?
The answer lies with the exponential function.
Every time you fold a sheet of paper, you double the number of sheets.
On the seventh fold you would have 128 sheets of paper between your fingers. And on the twelfth, you would have 4,096 sheets.
The piece of paper I used was an 80 gm piece of copy paper with a 0.1mm thickness. Theoretically, if I had folded it 42 times, I would have reached the moon.
This is what is so fascinating about exponential growth. The funny thing is, I would have only noticed my progress to the moon on the 35th fold.
It’s this feature of exponential growth that makes the novel coronavirus so deadly. It appears to rumble in the background for a long time and then, “BANG!” It shoots off like a rocket as if I was on the 35th fold.
The only difference is that the COVID-19 disease is far worse than folding paper.
When you fold a piece of paper you get a 100% return – You double the number of sheets of paper you have. The coronavirus, however, gives you a return of 250% every five days because an ill person will on average infect 2.5 people during this time.
Imagine after 30 days, “patient zero” recovers. By then 406 people have been infected and 12 killed (assuming the death rate is 3%). In eight weeks, 47,650 will have now been infected and 1,430 will have died. By twelve weeks, 8,063,596 are now infected and 241,908 are dead.
That’s why the shutdowns work so well. They alter the maths that underpin the virus. As soon as the virus falls below a one-to-one ratio, the number of infected begin to decline after “patient zero” recovers, preventing a pandemic.
Unfortunately, this exponential nature of the virus has created a lot of misunderstandings.
The economy is not actually being sacrificed
In the beginning, there appeared to be a trade-off between protecting people’s health through a lockdown and protecting people’s jobs and the economy.
However, this trade-off is an illusion because of the exponential nature of the virus.
Initially, containing the virus is affordable because the health system isn’t overwhelmed and softer lockdown measures are still an option. But, once the number of cases explode and overwhelm the country’s healthcare infrastructure, there is a point of no return.
That’s exactly what happened during the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic.
Two Federal Reserve economists showed in a recent paper that cities which implemented more severe social distancing measures, early on during the Spanish Flu outbreak, suffered few adverse long-run economic issues. Once the pandemic subsided, they experienced an increase in real economic activity and swiftly recovered the economic output lost.
By contrast, cities that failed to adopt these measures experienced higher mortality rates and a more severe negative impact on their economies over the longer term.
Here, the illusion is that politicians have tough decisions to make.
They don’t! The only choice is lockdown.
The coronavirus is not a black swan event
The coronavirus might seem like a fluke, or a black swan event. But it really isn’t.
There are millions and billions of viruses out there and so it was just a matter of time before one of them stuck around and spread through our global population.
Pandemics are inevitable. They have happened throughout human history, and they will happen again.
The coronavirus wasn’t an unpredictable outlier. We had plenty of warnings over the last two decades: SARS in 2004, H1N1 in 2009 and Ebola in 2015.
True black swan events are unknown-unknowns. When European explorers discovered actual black swans in Australia, they previously thought all swans were white.
This is not the same for the coronavirus. Statistically, scientist knew it was just a matter of time before the world experienced a pandemic. The coronavirus’ rapid emergence is nothing more than the exponential function at work, rather than a statistical improbability.
It’s all about appreciating the log scale!
I used the folding paper example at the beginning of this article to demonstrate exponential growth. There’s a good reason why.
Each fold represents a unit on a log scale. The number of folds represent the units on a log scale to the base 2 because the number of sheets doubles. Look at the diagram below.
Usually, we use log scale to the base 10 in real life, where everything increases by ten times. It’s easier to use because the number of zeros represent the units on the scale (rather than the folds on a piece of paper). For instance, 100 has two zeros, therefore it is 2 on the base 10 log scale. Likewise, 1,000 has three zeros so it’s 3 on the base 10 log scale.
There are many applications of the log-scale in real life, which we barely notice. These measures include the volume on your stereo, acidity levels, the earthquake richter-scale and radioactivity.
When you look at these things in terms of a log scale, everything makes sense. The decision to lockdown economies becomes a no-brainer. The explosive nature of the virus becomes less surprising.
It also gives you a much clearer picture of where we are. In Europe, the log scale shows the decline in growth in new infections. You can see this in Italy, which was hit particularly badly by the virus. A normal scale doesn’t show this.
This is why folded paper is weirdly like the coronavirus. Each fold is an exponential unit. Once you understand that, then your perspective changes and you understand the mathematics of how the coronavirus spreads.
