Moving class online for the outbreak does not remove the need to discuss the outbreak. Students really want to understand the purpose of social distancing. Students are worried. Students want to know how long before things return to normal, are they going to catch the virus, and is anyone they know going to die. Some students are too sensitive to talk about their strong feelings in the classroom, yet others need the classroom as a safe space to explore their strong emotions.

Our students are very interested in the progression of the outbreak, and they want to feel like they can do something about it. And they can! They are launching a petition to help stop the spread of Coronavirus. They have been asking all sorts of questions and have been doing some very cool math based on current events and articles. We want to share some of these with you and we wanted to share your students’ cool Coronavirus math with us. It is terrifying, and it is terrible, but talking about their emotions while processing the complex information about the virus in a cross-disciplinary approach is powerful, and provides a creative and appropriate outlet. They are reading the news anyway, and they are already concerned, and this gives. them the outlet to manage these concerns and information.

The data and information coming in about the pandemic is rich in opportunity for a multidisciplinary study. Here are some examples:

Problem #1. Calculate infection or death doubling rate in your state and graph it. Our state is Illinois. Our state has now reported 16 days worth of data here. The way the data is reported, is that you can’t see it. You can mine it from the press releases the state publishes daily, but mostly you have to copy it daily. This is something that even the younger students can do at 3PM Central Time for the day, or the next morning here in Illinois and could easily be done with regular math students in 5th grade and up completely, and the graphing can be done with even the younger students, if you are following US Common Core.

Problem #2, building on Problem 1. How many days before the infection rate in your state reaches 1 million at the current doubling speed?

Problem #3, building on Problem 1. Using the articles in citation below, and the doubling rate from Problem 1 (feel free to use your state/country data instead):

How many days before we run out of beds in ICU, assuming that patients using the beds have not died and have not gotten better (are continuing to use the beds).
How many days before we run out of ventilators, assuming that patients using the ventilators have not died and have not gotten better (are continuing to use the ventilators).
In 30 days, what magnitude fewer will there be available equipment vs. need?
Civics bonus: what can/should be done about this?

Citations:

Guan WJ, Ni ZY, Hu Y, Liang WH, Ou CQ, He JX, et al. Clinical characteristics of coronavirus disease 2019 in China. N Engl J Med. 2020. https://doi.org/10.1056/NEJMoa2002032.
Coronavirus threatens health system capacity, STEPHANIE GOLDBERG, Crains Chicago Business, March 17, 2020

Please, send us links to your math problems and solutions below. We will update this shortly with our graphs and answers.