To think this way is to misunderstand exponential growth. If you're concerned with personal risk, the biggest thing that matters is the current spread. Of cou

To think this way is to misunderstand exponential growth. If you're concerned with personal risk, the biggest thing that matters is the current spread. Of course if everyone is concerned with that, nobody will be concerned until it is too late to prevent a large portion of us from getting it. However if you're concerned with the trajectory, all that you care about is whether R is less than or greater than 1. For both 2 and 10 it will hit a large part of the population, all at once. But 1.01 and 0.99 is the difference between "we all get it" and "only a small fraction of us get it".