Hannah Fry

Anyway, less than two years later, obviously, the real pandemic hit.

The thing is, I think to a lot of the world, it was a real shock.

But I think to the epidemiologists who were studying this, they were sort of shouting from the rooftops that actually...

it was that something like this was inevitable.

You'd already had SARS and MERS over in Asia.

The thing about COVID was that it had these particular characteristics that meant that it spread so fast without us being able to keep hold of it.

When the pandemic finally hit in the UK, it turned out that all of the data that we'd collected for this TV program formed the basis of

of the government models.

So on the UK government modeling, if you go on the kind of official websites, you will see all of this data referenced that we had collected.

It ended up being absolutely fundamental to the way that we model.

Wow.

Right.

But also the predictions that we've made with this kind of quite crude TV model that we had made that sort of 880,000 people would end up losing their lives if there were no interventions whatsoever.

NerveTag, which is one of the government groups that was assigned with making decisions, internal minutes from the governments.

This is the new and emerging respiratory virus threats advisory group, by the way.

Okay.

Their early estimates actually ended up being almost exactly the same numbers that we had come up with in the TV programme.

We said 886.

They said 833.

And there is, I think, some evidence that had there been no interventions whatsoever, the numbers could potentially have gone up that high.