COVID-19 is a very contagious virus.

[Ms. Toad]

31. There's two factors -

How many people does one infected person infect (R0), and over what period of time.

Having an R0 greater than one means the growth will be exponential, having a short transmission period governs how squished together the timeline is. (i.e. if you infect your 2.6 people in 3 days, those people will infect 2.6 more people in the next 3 days, etc. - in contrast if it takes you 10 days to infect your 2.6 people, those people will also have 10 days to infect their 2.6 people and the actual growth of infected people does not happen as quickly)

A number that merges those tww factors together is to think of it as how many new people are infected each day by the currently infected population. It was expanding at a rate of about 1.2 per day. It's slowed to about 1.08 per day (even includint the one day jump of ~15,000 patients)