Linear Mind, Exponential Suffering

by Lyssa Adkins

“Hey, hey,” my husband says to me as he climbs into bed after his late-night news fix. “Hey, I have to tell you the number.” He says, “We are right at 100,000. Can you believe it? I thought it would take at least a few more days before we got that close. We’re going to cross it today. It came up so fast.”  I feel the shot of adrenaline through my body/mind. My heart starts pumping, I am ready to jump out of bed and do…what? Nothing. Other than wearing my mask, taking this seriously, caring about strangers and voting what else can I do? I know that the 100,000 cases a day number means maybe 1,000 people will die according to the US’s current death rate (the death rate percentage seems exceptionally hard to find); right now, well more than 1,000 are dying each day and that number is climbing at an alarming rate. The other 99,000 from this one day of infections will have a preexisting condition for a virus about which we know scant little. Some of them will live with long haul effects. This is the suffering produced in just one day and we have had days upon months and coming up on a year of it. The suffering is astounding. Sometime it knocks me off my feet.

It’s been knocking me off my feet since early March when I started to tune into the data on the John’s Hopkins map. I would obsessively refresh the screen and watch the numbers on the map change, astounded that they were climbing so fast. To soften the blow, I would steel myself by guessing high what the next number would be but it wouldn’t be enough. Most of the time the number was higher than my high guess, knocking me off my feet anyway.

Perhaps we human beings are just not geared for exponential effects. I feel it in myself every time I expect a high number, refresh the screen and am shocked to see an even higher number. Look up “linear thinking and exponential growth” and you will get a host of resources, mostly about business, technology and climate change, all saying the same thing: the human mind struggles to project exponentially because we humans think linearly. Yet, the world is changing exponentially.

Years ago I read a book about tipping points, doubling and exponential growth. It’s been so long ago I can’t remember the author or book title and the exocortex of the Internet search can’t come up with it, either. But I remember one notion in that book so clearly. It was the idea of the “last doubling” that would send the population over the edge, or over the tipping point. The book asserted that, as humans, we would be so poor at projecting the exponential nature of growth and so unable to understand changeable doubling rates that we would not be able to detect when we are getting close to the “last doubling” which would then send us over the tipping point. I’m not sure what the tipping point or points might be in the COVID-19 pandemic, and I’m clear that I would not be able to see them coming, linear thinker as I am. But, I worry about them.

Just to take you on a little journey with me through my early obsession with the data and the consequences it represented…  

MARCH 17, 2020

The total number creeps up on 200,000. I have been watching this thing jump up for days and now I feel it’s my duty to capture the “state of affairs” just before we cross the 200,000 threshold. Wow, 200,000 people infected so fast (so so fast) and almost 8,000 dead already.

MARCH 18, 2020

Less than 12 hours later and we already have crossed the 200,000 threshold.

MARCH 20, 2020

I notice the GIS folks had to decrease the scale on the bubbles because the whole world map was turning red.

MARCH 21, 2020

It took only 3 days to jump by 100,000 cases and 1 day to jump by 50,000 cases. This must be the effect of the increase in doubling time I read about so long ago. This is too much to take. When I think that each of those numbers is a person, and a family, and a community…

MARCH 22, 2020

Why am I obsessively screen capturing this map? I guess I just feel like someone has to witness it. Not let it pass by. Not let us forget what is happening for later when our collective memory glosses it all over.

MARCH 24, 2020

Holy crap. Only took another 3 days for 100,000 more. We are counting in the hundreds of thousands now. Unbelievable. Almost to 20,000 people dead. That is the size of many towns.

MARCH 25, 2020

When I refresh this map, I expect the number to jump up, but somehow I don’t expect it to jump up so fast or hurt my heart so much. But it does. Pretty much every time. I don't want to become numb to this. It has to be felt, at least in some small way to honor all those suffering and dead, and it looks like we’ve just barely started.

MARCH 26, 2020

Over half a million now.

The US has officially surpassed China in infected people. What are we in for? I am terrified.

APRIL 1, 2020

April Fool’s Day! Not so much. Nothing to get witty about here. US infections are over 200,000. About the same number of people recovered worldwide so far. I don't quite understand why that feels ominous to me, but somehow I sense that comparison doesn’t portend well for us.

APRIL 2, 2020

Over 1 million cases. Only 17 days ago I started the screen captures and we were just shy of 200,000 then. Seventeen days to get to 1 million with the US about ¼ of that. I notice my nation is almost completely red. Europe is, too, and I feel for my friends and colleagues there. And, this feels much closer to home.

APRIL 15, 2020 8:34AM EST

I stopped obsessively saving the map every day. It’s been 13 days since my last screen grab. I still checked the map a little too obsessively, but pulled back on saving it. My feeling became, “Nothing special here. Just the relentless uptick I am coming to expect.”

But today is different. Today we are on the cusp of 2 million people infected worldwide and the virus running rampant in major US cities.

APRIL 15, 2020 1:14PM EST

And now, we are over 2 million. The weight of it is almost too much to bear.

MAY 25, 2020

Just one more for the chronicle. I felt compelled to capture this one. Creeping up on 5.5 million infected people and almost 350,000 dead. How much worse can this get???

Picking up groceries in a home made face mask

I have the sense that this can get much worse. It all feels so overwhelming. So, I focus on what I can do. Make face masks from Agile conference socks and t-shirts — those came in handy! Pick up my groceries and try not to infect the 3 seniors in my life (husband and parents), although I’m being super conservative for myself, too, because people of all ages are dying. I’m now obsessively checking my state data and US data. Although I know that obsession will fade, too, as the numbers get too high for me to easily remember that they represent human beings and as the feeling of others’ suffering becomes more abstract.

Here are some resources I came across as I was searching (in vain) for that danged book I read about doubling rates and tipping points: 

The Difference Between Linear and Exponential Thinking

How to Create an Exponential Mindset

Visualising the doubling time of COVID-19 allows comparison of the success of containment measures

Cognitive bias: Compassion fade. The predisposition to behave more compassionately towards a small number of identifiable victims than to a large number of anonymous ones. 

This blog post was initially posted at LyssaAdkins.com on Nov 1, 2020