Insight: You can have both Economic Health and Physical Health.

Take Away: Lots of individuals, institutions, and governments are stuck in a false dichotomy: “Do we open and accept the deaths?” or “Do we stay safe at home even if we have to destroy our livelihoods?”. Viewing our choices in this binary way is not at all unhelpful. Dealing with COVID-19 does not have to be a choice between either having a functional economy or a healthy populace.

Insight: The exponential growth of the virus is powerful. Have clear goals in the face of this onslaught.

Take Away: We are all taking extraordinary actions at the moment to slow the growth of the virus. Do you know why you are taking these actions? What are your local government’s goals for social distancing? Do you know whether your local government is on track to meet those goals? Understand what our choices are. Demand that your government tell you its goals, and prove to you that it is on track to achieving those goals.

Insight: We, as humans, are not built to understand exponential growth.

Take Away: Until the total case load actually decreases from one day to the next, you and your community need to be acting more forcefully than you think you should. One action now is worth much, much, more than action in the future.

Insight: The pandemic is global, your epidemic is local, by the time it is personal it will be too late.

Take Away: What is happening locally is more important than what is happening in your state, your country, or the larger world. You need to act locally. The sooner and more forcefully, the better.

Chances are that by the time you know of a friend of a friend who has the novel coronavirus, it will be too late to change the course of your local epidemic.

Insight: Facts matter and the presentation of those facts is critical. E.g. the data must show exponential projections out into the future not just today’s static numbers.

Take Away: I want you to see what I’m seeing in this crisis and so I will share with you the information I am looking at. I will also help interpret it for you because some of the sources are raw or obscure. If you think you have data that I need to be focused on or is missing from the website, please reach out to me.

Take Away: Many COVID-19 articles show a misunderstanding of the nature of this crisis. Such articles may get you to act in detrimental ways.  I want you to know how to spot quality information. Our posts on data literacy are in the tools page just below the county level tracker.