Hannah Fry
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Appearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
Because it's a dynamical system, it's something that changes over time, something that is, you can actually write the equations for it incredibly simply, you can teach them in an undergraduate course, and yet you can also make the models
incredibly sophisticated and complicated.
So much so that there are people whose entire careers have been in the study of the spread of epidemics.
The problem was at the time, the kind of cutting edge research in the UK, this is like 2007, 2018, right?
The cutting edge research in the UK
had to be based on data.
By the way, I should just add, just a quick reminder for everybody, this is two years before the actual pandemic.
I sort of think that the date of 2020 is probably seared into the minds of everybody, but we're talking before the actual pandemic.
The data that everybody was using at that point was essentially a paper survey that had been conducted some 20 years earlier that essentially said to a thousand people in the UK,
Hey, how many people do you reckon you were in contact with last week?
Okay, so it was like, people had to recall where they'd been, they had to kind of create a record based on memory.
And it was only 1000 people.
And it was by that point, you know, nearly 20 years old.
And so all of the academics, all of the mathematicians knew that if another pandemic
were ever to come, were ever to hit.
Anything like the Spanish flu epidemic that had killed more than 100 million people around the world the century before, if anything like that were to happen again, we were sort of woefully underprepared for what we actually needed.
So what we decided to do, we decided to set up this massive citizen science experiment where we created an app,
that we got 100,000 people to download and the app would track people and as they moved around and how they came into contact with other people.
Other people who had the app, yeah.
So we had 100,000 people all over the country basically playing this massive game of let's have a pretend pandemic that we spread out across everywhere.