Hannah Fry

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.

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.