The upside of exponentials. There is, though, another exponential that may end up saving us: Moore’s Law, which was coined by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore in 1965 and posited that the speed and processing power of computers would double every two years, as more transistors could be steadily packed on a microchip.

Intel, to explain the power of Moore’s Law to make all kinds of things better, smarter, faster, had its engineers take a 1971 Volkswagen Beetle and try to calculate what that car would be like today if it had improved at the same exponential rate that microchips had improved since 1971. Intel’s engineers’ best guess was that that Volkswagen Beetle today would go about 300,000 miles per hour, it would get two million miles per gallon and it would cost 4 cents.

That is the power of an exponential in engineering on the upside — and it may be just the kind of exponential that can also help bring us a coronavirus treatment and vaccine quickly.

As Nitin Pai, director of the Takshashila Institution, an independent research center in Bangalore, India, wrote on livemint.com on Sunday: “Advances in computer technology and synthetic biology have revolutionized both detection and diagnosis of pathogens, as well as the processes of design and development of vaccines, subjecting them to Moore’s Law-type cycles. Recent epidemics, starting with SARS, and including H1N1, Ebola, Zika and now Covid-19, will drive more talent and brainpower to the biological and epidemiological sciences.”

But will it be fast enough? Even in the age of supercomputers, noted Gautam Mukunda, a research fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Center for Public Leadership, “we still have no vaccine for H.I.V. or malaria — two widespread critical diseases that we have been fighting for years. It is definitely true that the science will reach the point where we can develop new vaccines on the fly; the problem is, it’s still really, really hard.”

Will American culture or politics be fundamentally changed by this pandemic? I know for sure one joke Republican politicians will not be telling on the campaign trail this year. It’s the one where they impugn the deep state, government bureaucrats and get the audience to laugh by saying, “Hi, I’m from the government and I’m here to help.”

We’ll get through this crisis because of the depth of talent, and selfless commitment, in our deep state, our Big Government: the scientists, the medical professionals, the disaster professionals, the environmental experts — all the people whom Trump tried to prune. Right now I am rooting for both Big Government and Big Pharma to rescue us.