Is this an blog on hub and spoke vs. lane transportation operating philosophies? No. This is about everyone's favorite topic, Coronavirus, and the problem with it.
The problem, generally, isn't that it's so deadly or horrible to survive for most people. So, why not just let everyone get it and get over it and be done with it? The problem is how fast the infection spreads and what that means for our health care system and patients who need it. If we just let things happen, the 10% or so that need hospitalization for a while will swamp our "right sized" healthcare industry. We don't have enough beds, doctors and ventilators to cover even a fraction of what would be needed if we did that. That means a lot of folks would die unnecessarily. What to do, then? In general, we need to "flatten the curve".
https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/11/flattening-curve-coronavirus/
For the more "math-y" https://medium.com/@tomaspueyo/coronavirus-act-today-or-people-will-die-f4d3d9cd99ca
How to flatten the curve? Have fewer spokes. Make your spokes skinny.
If you think of yourself as a hub that is connected to the other people you come in contact with as spoke, and draw that picture out with each person you are connected to as having a spoke with each person THEY are connected to and so on, you can see that if each person has a lot of spokes, then you don't have to go out too far until you come to someone who has coronavirus. Fewer spokes, you have to go out more "levels" until you reach and infected person.
If you then think about each spoke as a conduit for likely transmission, then you can draw that spoke as a fat pipe if it's close contact and skinny if it's a less likely path for transmission. Somebody you sit next to at work - fat pipe. The person who stocked those black beans you bought at Kroger this morning - skinny pipe. So, the goal is to have less spokes and make each spoke as skinny as possible.
If you think about indoor places with hard surfaces that have lots of traffic - airports, mass transit vehicles, grocery stores - and you know that the virus can stay viable on hard surfaces for a couple of days - you then have lots and lots of skinny spokes to lots and lots of people who have touched that surface or item or coughed on it in the past couple days.
If you think of each day as its own diagram, then overlay each day on top of the other, you can see that repeated contact with the same people is not as risky as contact with different people each day.
Right now, each infected person is infecting over two other people. That's what causes the geometric growth of cases. If you want the number cases to stop growing, you have to get that transmission number under one. You do that by cutting the number and width of the spokes between each of us.
The problem isn't whether you or I will have a rough time with the disease. Odds are, we won't. But, out "sized for normal circumstances" health care industry can't handle a sure the size of what this virus did to China and now Italy. Places that have "flattened the curve" have death rates of 1% or less because it doesn't overwhelm their health care system Places that are overwhelmed have much higher death rates.
And, each of us trying to cut or shrink our spokes to others we contact doesn't just affect us, but everyone they have spokes to, and those people, and on down the line.
How do you reduce and shrink your spokes? Tons of ideas here: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/community/index.html
But, remember this doesn't mean you have to lock yourself in a closet! There are lots of low risk, skinny spoke things you can do. Go for a drive. Go for a hike. Go bicycling. Gardening. Go camping. Play tennis and golf. Play cards with your friends. Go to the botanical gardens. Go railfanning. (of course!). Get back into your hobbies and crafts. Go to the beach. Get to those procrastinated house projects. Make a photobook of your last trip. Go shopping - on Amazon. Plan your next trip (this problem IS going to be solved - it's just how much pain we have to go through...and how long it will take) Learn a new language or calculus (huh?)
So, it's not about us. It's about all of us. Pay attention to your spokes! The life you save may be your friend's co-workers son's mother-in-law.
