To illustrate the effectiveness of social distancing measures, let’s consider the following example. Starting off with one infected person, the virus spreads and the number of cases doubles every four days. 36 days into the outbreak, we have 512 cases and government A decides to do something. It implements social distancing measures that, for the sake of simplicity, immediately bring the doubling time from four days up to eight days. Meanwhile government B doesn’t think it’s necessary to do anything and lets the virus spread unchecked. Three and a half weeks later, 60 days into the outbreak, government A is dealing with 4,096 cases while government B is looking at more than 30,000 cases.

To further show how big of a factor time is when dealing with exponential growth, let’s bring government C in, which decides to implement the same measures as government A, only eight days later, once it has reached 2,000 cases. In this case, the measures are still highly effective, but the country still ends up with twice as many cases as country A, which simply acted quicker.