Hannah Fry

Welcome back.

Michael, frankly, I'm astonished that it's taken me this long to tell you about one of the most extraordinary coincidences that has ever happened.

Okay, so in around 2017, 2018, I was working just as a mathematician at UCL.

When you do mathematical modelling,

One of the things that a lot of people spend time making mathematical models of is epidemics, is the spread of disease, right?

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.