


The Administration has previously implemented policies requiring millions of federal employees and federal contractors to be fully vaccinated. Mayo Clinic adopted its own mandate a few weeks ago. The rule applies to more than 17 million workers at approximately 76,000 health care facilities, including hospitals and long-term care facilities. Under the other mandate, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services will require that health care workers at facilities participating in Medicare and Medicaid are fully vaccinated. This rule will cover 84 million employees. The OSHA rule will also require that these employers provide paid-time for employees to get vaccinated, and ensure all unvaccinated workers wear a face mask in the workplace. There is a number of variations to the rules that improve accuracy.Under one of the mandates, the Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration will require employers with 100 or more employees to ensure each of their workers is fully vaccinated or tests for COVID-19 on at least a weekly basis. The choice of number is mostly a matter of preference: 69 is more accurate for continuous compounding, while 72 works well in common interest situations and is more easily divisible. They can also be used for decay to obtain a halving time. These rules apply to exponential growth and are therefore used for compound interest as opposed to simple interest calculations.

Although scientific calculators and spreadsheet programs have functions to find the accurate doubling time, the rules are useful for mental calculations and when only a basic calculator is available. The rule number (e.g., 72) is divided by the interest percentage per period (usually years) to obtain the approximate number of periods required for doubling. In finance, the rule of 72, the rule of 70 and the rule of 69.3 are methods for estimating an investment's doubling time. Methods of estimating the doubling time of an investment
