MEMONAVIRUS
an analysis by AgainWeWander
patient zero
On March 20th, 2020 at 7:59 PM, reddit user woodendoors7 got very sick. Over the next month, his illness would spread to 126,852 r/memes users. Here's how it happened.
how it works
Once the virus was let loose, new users could be infected by:
The former guaranteed transmission of the virus. The latter only transmitted the virus in 1% of cases.
the infection spreads
Within minutes of becoming infected woodendoors7 started a chain reaction. In under an hour, the virus spread to 26 users. In under a day, 2,780 were sick.
Figure 1: Infections in the first hour
and keeps spreading
The number of new cases peaked in the first few days of the pandemic, before slowly tapering off. As more users became infected, the rate of infections slowed significantly and "flattened" the curve.
Figure 2: New infections by day
Figure 3: Cumulative infections by day
comments can kill
Over 98% of infections happened from direct contact (i.e., replying to the comment of an already-infected user).
Figure 4: Infections by cause
users can save
Surprisingly, the majority of users did not spread the virus at all. Only 1 in 3 users infected someone else.
Figure 5: Infectors vs. non-infectors
bots are evil
That said, there were a handful of super-spreaders who infected hundreds of users. In this case, they were mostly bots.
Table 1: Users responsible for most infections
| user | number infected |
|---|---|
| RepostSleuthBot | 3,311 |
| AutoModerator | 2,028 |
| fualtyzane | 1,171 |
fast but not furious
Users who infected others did so quickly. The median time to infect another user was just 6 hours and 6 minutes. About 60% of infected users spread the virus within 24 hours of contracting it.
But despite spreading quickly, the virus did not spread far. The average infection rate was .999, just shy of the 1-to-1 ratio necessary to maintain a steady infected population. This suggests that even if the mods had not ended the event, the growth in cases had stalled.
special mentions
Dirtiest user
In the underlying data, users could technically be infected by the virus more than once. Shout out to effective_techer for catching the virus more than anyone else, a jaw-dropping 70 times.
Dirtiest comment
This comment from Kind-Pop infected 300 users, more than any other during the infection.
"To clear this up: Replying to an infected person's comment will definitely make you infected. Commenting on a post made by an infected person has a 1% chance of making you infected."
Best hygiene
User bappodrinklacto spent the longest time infected without spreading the virus to any other users: 27 days, 19 hours, and 2 minutes.
Luckiest user
No one rolled the dice more than porntipsguzzardobot who made 173 comments on the posts of previously-infected users before finally succumbing to the virus.
explore
search for a specific user
Want to see how you did? Search for a specific user to get their infection stats.
searches are case sensitive
data notes