(Chicago Tribune) The Great Chicago Fire of 1871 — 149 years ago this week — put the city to flame. Chicago burned house by house, block by block, and neighborhood by neighborhood. The coronavirus has not set all of Chicagoland alight but, if not for quick action to identify, contain and extinguish the blaze, it could. Data shows that COVID-19 …
Don’t let governors fool you about reopening
(CNN)Many governors are opening up their states as part of the White House effort to reopen the country. But as a pandemic expert who has been warning about diseases like Covid-19 for nearly 15 years, my message to Americans is simple: save yourselves, your families and your communities by staying at home and ignoring your governor’s “ludicrous” policies.
We need an immediate five-week national lockdown to defeat coronavirus in America
(USA Today )I am an MIT-trained physicist and complexity scientist who studies pandemics. I have warned about global pandemics due to increasing travel for 15 years. I recommended community-based monitoring of symptoms to stop Ebola in West Africa in 2014, and it worked. The fastest and even the only way to contain COVID-19 in the United States is a five-week national lockdown.
The ‘Complex Systems Theorist’ Who Predicted the Arab Spring
(Vice) In early 2011, a few days before Tunisian street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire in the middle of a busy street, Yaneer Bar-Yam sent his research to the US government. Bar-Yam’s message was simple: If drastic measures weren’t immediately taken to lower skyrocketing global food prices, widespread violence would occur. Bouazizi’s act set off food riots and are widely …
Transition to extinction: Pandemics in a connected world
(Medium) The video (Figure 1) shows a simple model of hosts and pathogens we have used to study evolutionary dynamics. In the animation, the green are hosts and red are pathogens. As pathogens infect hosts, they spread across the system. If you look closely, you will see that the red changes tint from time to time — that is the …
Did Authorities Use the Wrong Approach to Stop Ebola?
(Time100) It’s known that the response to the most recent Ebola outbreak, which as of Tuesday had infected more than 27,000 people and killed 11,130, was far too slow. Now, a new study suggests that even once they got started, their approach to curbing the spread wasn’t the most efficient or effective.