Between hoarding a year’s worth of toilet paper to the birth of a new genre of porn, the coronavirus has got people a bit on edge. So in an attempt to bring a bit of levity to the situation while also bringing to the table a “looks good… on paper” solution to the coronavirus panic, I’ve decided to do some grim maths on how much it will cost to put a coronavirus-proof tarp made of face masks over Australia.
Speaking of the coronavirus panic, the GOAT team talk about the biggest talking points about the disease on ‘It’s Been A Big Day For…’ below:
First we need to work out just how big of a coronavirus-proof tarp we’ll need that’ll drape over Australia, and the easiest way to do that is to use the furthest points of the continent as reference points.
We know that the widest point of Australia is about 4,030 km going east to west, so let’s make the width of our tarp 4,500 km – or 4,500,000 metres – to account for the various bumps across the land and support pylons to hold it up (more on that later).
Using the highest point on mainland Australia as reference for how high the tarp needs to sit about the continent, we land at Mount Kosciuszko which is 2,228 metres. Let’s make it an even 2,300 metres to make the math simpler.
With the help of an ellipsis calculator from Google (since the tarp isn’t a perfect circle), a width of 4,500,000 metres and height of 2,300 metres means our coronavirus-proof tarp will need to be about 81,500,000,000 square metres big.
Next we need to figure out what sort of material to make our Australian coronavirus-proof tarp out of and the easiest way to do that is to use a heap of those $20(ish) N95 face masks since that’s what doctors are telling everyone to wear.
Now we need to figure out how many N95 face masks we need. To do that, let’s first work out how many N95 face masks go into a square metre. One mask is about 13 cm by 10 cm, giving us a surface area of 130 square cm. Dividing one square metre by that gives us 76.9, meaning that 77 N95 face masks go into one square metre.
Multiplying 77 by the size of our coronavirus-proof tarp, we therefore need about 6,280,000,000,000 face masks in order to completely cover Australia.
Okay, we have our coronavirus-proof, face mask tarp but we need some 2,300 metre high steel support pylons to hold it or it’ll droop across areas in Australia that we don’t want it to droop. Let’s keep things simple and have about three pylons across the border of each state and territory, which means we’ll need about 15 pylons
Finally, we can work out how much this will all cost.
The steel pylons will need to be strong and it costs around $400 per metre of the good stuff. Let’s bump that up to about $500 per metre due to the specialised nature of this project, which will give us a total cost of $17,250,000 for the 15 pylons we need.
As for the tarp, an N95 face mask costs about $25 so the cost of buying 6,280,000,000,000 of them will set Australia back about $157,000,000,000,000. That’s 157 trillion.
All in all, the cost of putting a coronavirus-proof tarp made of N95 face mask material over Australia will cost at least… $157,000,017,250,000 million.
As expensive as it all is, this figure doesn’t even take into account the cost of labour and other secondary expenses required to make this coronavirus-proof face mask tarp a reality, which will definitely push Australia even further in the red. Hell, this math isn’t even rooted in any scientific basis and is more than likely to contain errors and/or incorrect assumptions.
So what is the point of all this math? Aside from providing a bit of much-needed levity during these tough times, I hoped to show that all this panic over the coronavirus is pretty overblown and it’s all akin to, well, putting a disease-proof tarp made of face masks over Australia.
There’s simply no need to overreact or hoard supplies like the apocalypse is coming. Doctors and scientists are doing all they can about the coronavirus and hopefully it’ll be over soon.
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