The great Warren Buffet knows all about compound interest. That’s how you get rich. And that’s also the calculus of the coronavirus that far too few officials (e.g. Donald Trump and Mark Emmert) fully understand.

It goes like this. A checkerboard (or chess board, for you snooty coastal elites) has 64 squares. Put a penny on one square and the rule is that each day you double the penny and move it to another square. So that on the second day you have 2 cents, on the third 4 cents, on the 4th 8 cents, on the fifth 16 cents, on the sixth 32 cents (yes, this is just the power of 2 going nutty), on the 7th 64 cents and on the 8th $1.28.

By the time you get to that first row you have one dollar and 28 cents out of that penny. But you still have seven more rows.

By the time you get halfway through the board that penny has become more than $20 million. And we’re just getting started. Eventually you would actually have in the trillions of dollars. In just 64 days.

Now do the same thing with a virus and people. 64 days is nine weeks. Would the number of coronavirus patients double every day? Probably not, but the chances of that happening would be much higher if we all congregated in public places (sports events, concerts, etc.). So when we bitch and/or moan about basketball games being canceled or Pearl Jam’s tour being postponed, it might help to understand something about compound interest.

Because if all of us walked around as cavalierly spreading germs as our president and other CPAC attendees do, we’d go from Patient Zero to every human being on the planet in less than nine weeks. The thing to think about now is that this virus is warning shot for humanity. We’re lucky that it’s not more lethal. It’s dangerous, sure, but the mortality rate is very low. What if it weren’t?