Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit
kitd | on: Hannah Fry Wins the Leelavati Prize in 2026 for Mathematics Outreach
Well deserved.

Her most memorable program for me was her 2018 program "Contagion" which modelled a virus outbreak among volunteers in the town of Haslemere, UK, using an app measuring Bluetooth proximity.

Guess which town contained the UK's Covid patient zero a year later!

Edit: found it here https://youtu.be/yISdMLbO0Wc?is=T-Tq9LwzLgbusuoe

skerit | parent | next
And on her podcast with Vsauce she said the reason they chose that town was because their budget was so low and they could sleep over at a crew member's family there.
willis936 | root | parent
Which episode? I subscribe but I don't have the attention surplus to listen to them all.
inamorty | root | parent
https://youtu.be/ClqvH-uG2Mw

Hannah Predicted a Pandemic | The Rest Is Science

nephihaha | root | parent
So did Bill Gates in his Ted talk six years before and the Event 201 table top exercise six months before lockdown.

The second one also managed to predict the use of trusted media and keeping intercontinental flights going throughout the pandemic.

willis936 | root | parent
Wait until you watch the 2011 movie Contagion.
dspillett | parent | next
> UK's Covid patient zero a year later!

I thought our first confirmed case was in York, very late in January 2020, who was staying at the Staycity hotel while visiting a family member attending the University here. That hotel is just around the corner from where we do martial arts of an evening, so we were acutely aware of that bit of news. Though IIRC they were from another country, so might not count depending on how "UK's Covid patient zero" is defined.

kitd | root | parent
Yeah, you're probably right. Looking back at news reports, it looks like the Haslemere case may have been the first person infected within the UK, ie they hadn't been abroad.
pmg101 | parent
And didn't the NHS app use Bluetooth proximity to alert you if you'd been in contact with a COVID case early in the pandemic? A nice case of life imitating art.
kitd | root | parent
Yeah, just watching the first few minutes of the program, it's astonishing how prophetic it was.
rustyhancock | root | parent
It's not prophetic. Prophetic means it predicts the future, this is epidimlogical science being applied as intended. It didn't predict the future it designed it because we applied it.

Contagion used GPS logging to predict who was where an applied a random transmission risk based on that.

The actual origin of the Bluetooth proximity and duration tracking was from FluPhone back in 2010 or so[0]

Human contact networks, and epidemiology is a long standing science COVID just made that apparent for the lay public.

Quarantines have existed for centuries, contact tracing is Victorian (smallpox mostly),social distancing, It was all application of research that largely already existed.

[0] https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/srg/netos/projects/archive...

thegabriele | root | parent
Since you seems well versed in the matter...Did we learn something new from the whole covid experience?
lostlogin | root | parent | next
> Did we learn something new from the whole covid experience?

The hardest part of a 5 day snap lockdown are the first 10 weeks.

nephihaha | root | parent
Yes: * That you sell a six month lockdown by saying it will take two or three weeks. You can do this several times.

* That censorship is essential.

* That any public disagreement will be responded to with terms of personal abuse.

* That you can use it to introduce/try out all kinds of other long-desired schemes like digital ID (so called passports) or increasing working from home.