The 2014 Ebola outbreak in west Africa raised many questions about the control of infectious disease in an increasingly connected global society. Limited availability of contact information has made contact tracing difficult or impractical in combating the outbreak. We consider the development of multi-scale public health strategies and simulate policies for community-level response aimed at early screening of communities rather …
Transition to Extinction: Pandemics in a Connected World
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 natural …
How Community Response Stopped Ebola
In January of 2014 I spoke at the World Health Organization in Geneva, Switzerland. During the presentation I described our work on pathogen evolution and the effect of long range transportation [1]. I included our video about the risk of Ebola due to increasing transportation in Africa as it develops economically (Figure 2). The general expectation is that prior experience is …
Solving the Coronavirus Conundrum with Complexity Science
(Calcalistech) The transformation of Yaneer Bar-Yam into one of the biggest stars of the coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic in the U.S. is an extraordinary event. After all, the most sought after interviewees these days are epidemiologists and doctors, and Bar-Yam is an MIT-trained physicist, one of the creators of complexity science – a new innovative field of research that only a …