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Has COVID made us better at maths? - Printable Version

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Has COVID made us better at maths? - Kyng - 10-21-2020

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/oct/13/pandemic-mathematical-theory-matt-hancock

When Boris Johnson addressed the nation to announce new coronavirus restrictions last month, he talked about how the virus would “spread again in an exponential way” and warned us that the “iron laws of geometric progression [shout] at us from the graphs”.

My first reaction, as an applied mathematician, was to smile to myself at his careless use of mathematical ideas. Disease spread is nearly always exponential, it is just another way of saying that the virus multiplies over time. So, it is not the exponential nature of the growth itself that has changed, but the multiplication constant (the R number) that has increased. The term “geometric progression” implies that the virus spreads at evenly spaced, discrete intervals, rather than continuously, at any time of the day.

The prime minister’s faux-academic style isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but most of us have a sense of what he is trying to get at (even if he is taking liberties with the terms). We have seen the graphs of cases and deaths; we have understood log scales (where 1, 10, 100, 1000 … are equally spaced on the y-axis of the graphs); we know that we want the R number to be less than one; and we get why exponential growth leads to sudden outbreaks.


It'd be nice if this was the case... but, sadly, I haven't seen this in my own life :( . Sure, there's been a lot of talk about exponential growth, and why it's important to keep "the R number" less than 1 - but, my experience is that the only people to really understand any of this were the ones who were already good at maths anyway. Granted, everyone got scared as the case counts exploded into the thousands - but, that's not because everyone understood the mechanics behind exponential growth: it's because everyone gets intimidated by big, scary numbers :P .

So, would you say the pandemic-related facts and figures have helped to improve your mathematical ability at all?

RE: Has COVID made us better at maths? - MamaFrankie - 10-23-2020

No, I've always been crap at maths and always will be.