I'm not saying everyone should panic, but saying this is no big deal is dumb, too. I bet people in Italy thought it was NBD a few weeks ago, too. Here's an excerpt from an article I read recently:

"When a danger is growing exponentially, everything looks fine until it doesn’t.

There’s an old brain teaser that goes like this: You have a pond of a certain size, and upon that pond, a single lilypad. This particular species of lily pad reproduces once a day, so that on day two, you have two lily pads. On day three, you have four, and so on.

Now the teaser. “If it takes the lily pads 48 days to cover the pond completely, how long will it take for the pond to be covered halfway?”

The answer is 47 days. Moreover, at day 40, you’ll barely know the lily pads are there.

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That grim math explains why so many people — including me — are worried about the novel coronavirus, which causes a disease known as covid-19. And why so many other people think we are panicking over nothing."