Has living through a pandemic made us all better at maths? | David Sumpter
A radio host used mathematical theory to take Matt Hancock to task. It's a welcome sign we're all thinking in a more critical way
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.
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