Hannah Fry

Exactly.

So then essentially we got three things from it, right?

So we got this really, really detailed simulation of a pandemic.

We also got really, really, really detailed data on real people wandering around their lives and how they were moving around and where they were moving to.

And we asked people questions on this app about how many people did you talk to today, that kind of thing.

It's unbelievably rich data set.

And then the third thing, because this was like, we wanted to make it as big as possible, we made a big BBC program about it, made a big documentary about it.

So this program was aired in 2018, and it was like this very big deal on the BBC.

Because we were doing this big TV stunt,

We needed somewhere to start our pretend virus, right?

We needed somewhere to start our pretend pandemic and we needed somebody to start it.

So what we did is we kind of looked at a map of the UK and we were like, right, where is it most likely to start?

If we get another pandemic, where is it most likely to start?

And we were like, right, it's probably going to be somewhere in the southeast of the UK, probably a commuter town of London where there's millions and millions of people who live.

You sort of want somewhere that is near to the main airports, maybe between Gatwick and Heathrow, maybe somewhere that's nearer to the south coast.

So it could potentially have come up through that way.

So we picked this little town of Hazelmere in Surrey, and it's sort of like the Goldilocks town, right?

It's not too big, it's not too small, it's close to all the airports and so on.

It's got this really beautiful high street, it's got this really strong sense of community.

It's basically exactly the sort of place that you would want to destroy with an imaginary pandemic, you know?