Line Goes Up, Line Goes Down

One of the many things we all become instant-experts about two years ago was that when you have exponential growth processes, a very tiny change to the reproduction number (R) can mean the difference between exploding case loads and shrinking ones.

This was back when all the internet geniuses understood that covid was a public health issue, not simply an individual risk issue, and most importantly: every little bit helps.

Maybe no single mitigation measure seems to matter a lot for individal risk (even though they often do), but the point was that even marginally effective mitigation measures could have a tremendous impact on the caseloads (and hospitalizations and deaths).

All those horrible anti-social weirdos who did unncessary things like "wear masks" and "not go to the facelicking parties at Applebees" have likely, in the aggregate, reduced the overall number of cases and deaths quite a lot!

I'm sure we'll remember this if there's another variant (lol lmao no).