Tumblr has a feature hidden in their “Labs”, called “Reblog Graphs”. It’s a neat little thing that lets you see how influential you are, and also which blogs have large followings. It’s a great way to see why your post from three years ago is suddenly getting a thousand notes a day, too.
This is a graph of a couple hundred reblogs from a recent post somebody made.
The original post is the orange dot. I’m the purple dot one generation away. You can see how many people reblogged from me, but my following isn’t nearly as big as that large dot off to the right.
Only four people reblogged it from me, while that other person had a cluster of around a dozen. But you can see that my overall influence was greater. Their cluster died out quickly, while mine kept going and going.
You could say this post went viral.
That’s what I’m actually here to talk about today…
Let’s go back a slide and change the caption.
Now this isn’t a blog post we’re talking about, this is, say, a novel coronavirus that no one is immune to or something like that. Now we’re not talking about reblogs, we’re talking about infections.
I know this Patient Zero, they’re a friend of mine. We get together with another friend, whose sister works in a nursing home.
So now I’m infected. And so’s that other friend, whose sister works in the nursing home.
And I infect four other people.
It’s just a slight cough, and I feel silly for staying home over just a slight cough, so I go into work. Same goes for that sister who works in the nursing home.
It is week 1 of the pandemic.
It’s flu season, so none of my coworkers think twice about this fever and cough that they now have. Meanwhile, over at the nursing home, people start noticing that the flu is especially bad this year.
It is week 2 of the pandemic.
The nursing home realizes they have a huge problem. EMTs are taking several people to the hospital with trouble breathing every day. Two have died. And now Fire Station 27, the one near the nursing home, has several people who are sick.
Meanwhile, I’m feeling fine, and so are my coworkers who had the flu right after me.
It is now week 9 of the pandemic.
Each of these circles represents another week in the spread of the virus, with more and more people infected. You can see that the nursing home and the fire station in the upper right were contained by week 3, because they quarantined and stopped it. That outbreak made the news. But what didn’t make the news were all the people in the lower left, the ones who continue to spread it to one or two, maybe three people. Once in a while, a large cluster flares up, but for the most part, it’s silent.
What you might not see is how much of this graph rolls back up to me and my actions.
Fully 2/3 of the reblogs cases are the product of my infection. If you take me out of the picture, it’s not just those four people I infected that don’t get it. It’s the 7 people they infected. And the people they infected. And the people they infected.
Without me, it is over in Week 5. My single infection in week 1 ended up causing this to run for another month. If I’d stayed home that day instead of reblogging going to the office, it would’ve made a huge difference. It doesn’t really matter who patient zero was, every person on this graph is essentially patient zero of their own outbreak.
This is why staying home when sick matters. This is why hand-washing matters. This is why social distancing matters. This is why schools are closed and why large companies are having people work from home and why March Madness is canceled.
Because just one infection matters.
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