It's interesting that you lead by saying "as a physicist". As a physicist I'm used to thinking about orders of magnitude and whether something grows like log(N

It's interesting that you lead by saying "as a physicist". As a physicist I'm used to thinking about orders of magnitude and whether something grows like log(N) or N!. I'm pretty sure all the data points to this being O(a big problem) but I'd leave it to the epidemiologists to say anything with confidence.