The Rules of Contagion Quotes

“R = Duration × Opportunities × Transmission probability × Susceptibility”
― Adam Kucharski, The Rules of Contagion: Why Things Spread - and Why They Stop

“I can calculate the motion of heavenly bodies but not the madness of people.’ According to legend, Isaac Newton said this after losing a fortune investing in the South Sea Company. He’d bought shares in late 1719 and initially seen his investment rise, which persuaded him to cash in. However, the share price continued to climb and Newton – regretting his hasty sale – reinvested. When the bubble burst a few months later, he lost £20,000, equivalent to around £20 million in today’s money.[1]”
― Adam Kucharski, The Rules of Contagion: Why Things Spread - and Why They Stop

“We received a new dataset each day. Because it took time for new cases to be reported, there were fewer recent cases in each of these datasets: if someone fell ill on a Monday, they generally wouldn’t show up in the data until Wednesday or Thursday. The epidemic was still going, but these delays made it look like it was almost over.”
― Adam Kucharski, The Rules of Contagion: Why Things Spread - and Why They Stop

“Epidemiology is in fact a mathematical subject,’ he wrote in 1911, ‘and fewer absurd mistakes would be made regarding it (for example, those regarding malaria) if more attention were given to the mathematical study of it.’[28]”
― Adam Kucharski, The Rules of Contagion: Why Things Spread - and Why They Stop

“Tackling harmful content will have a direct effect – preventing a person from seeing it – as well as an indirect effect, preventing them spreading it to others. This means well-designed measures may prove disproportionately effective. A small drop in the reproduction number can lead to a big reduction in the size of an outbreak.”
― Adam Kucharski, The Rules of Contagion: Why Things Spread - and Why They Stop

“When something is going up without a convincing explanation about why it’s going up, that really is an illustration of the foolishness of the people,’ as he put it.[14]”
― Adam Kucharski, The Rules of Contagion: Why Things Spread - and Why They Stop

“Blaming certain groups for outbreaks is not a new phenomenon. In the sixteenth century, the English believed syphilis came from France, so referred to it as the ‘French pox’. The French, believing it to be from Naples, called it the ‘Neopolitan disease’. In Russia, it was the Polish disease, in Poland it was Turkish, and in Turkey it was Christian.[75]”
― Adam Kucharski, The Rules of Contagion: Why Things Spread - and Why They Stop

“As well as driving transmission in communities, social”
― Adam Kucharski, The Rules of Contagion: Why Things Spread - and Why They Stop