Ted Audio Collective

Hello, I'm Chris Anderson. Welcome to the Ted interview

We're gearing up for season four with some extraordinary guests

But I don't want to wait for that for today's episode because we're in the middle of a pandemic

And there's a guest I really wanted to talk to now

Here's Adam Kucharski and infectious diseases scientist who focuses on the mathematical modeling of pandemics

He's an associate professor at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and a Ted fellow

So what kind of behavior is actually important for epidemics?

Conversations close physical contacts what sort of data should we be collecting

Before an outbreak if we want to predict how infection might spread

To find out our team builds a mathematical model

When it comes to figuring out what to make of this pandemic known technically as COVID-19 and informally it's just the coronavirus

I find his thinking unbelievable be helpful and I'm excited to dive into it with you

A special call out to my friends on Twitter who offered up many suggestions for questions

I know this topic is on everyone's mind right now and what I hope this episode does is give us all a more nuanced way of

Thinking about how this pandemic has unfolded so far what might be to come and what we all collectively can do about it

Let's dive in

Adam welcome to the Ted interview. Thank you

So let's just start with a couple of basics a lot of

Skeptical peoples response certainly over the last few weeks may be less so now

Has been oh come on. This isn't such a big deal. There's a relatively tiny number of cases compare it to the flu compare it to anything else

There are much bigger problems in the world. Why are we making such a fuss?

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