The Rules of Contagion: Why Things Spread - and Why They Stop

by Adam Kucharski

The attitude has also taken hold among the wider community of outbreak researchers. One of the best examples is the Nextstrain project, pioneered by computational biologists Trevor Bedford and Richard Neher. This online platform automatically collates genetic sequences to show how different viruses are related and where they might have come from.

It’s not just for-profit companies that are building such datasets. Between 2006 and 2010, half a million people volunteered for the UK Biobank project, which aims to study patterns in genetics and health over the coming decades. As the dataset grows and expands, it will be accessible to teams around the globe, creating a valuable scientific resource. Since 2017, thousands of researchers have signed up to access the data, with projects investigating diseases, injuries, nutrition, fitness, and mental health.[40]

Similarly, the main reason governments are so worried about a future pandemic flu virus is that we won’t have an effective vaccine against the new strain. In the event of a pandemic, it would take six months to develop one,[14] by which time the virus will have spread widely.

We tend to focus on the metrics designed by social media companies (‘How do I get more likes? How do I get this post to go viral?’) rather than outcomes that will actually make us healthier, happier, or more successful.