A few weeks ago the Economist listed a few books that their staff recommended if one wanted to read about the building crisis due to the Wuhan virus. One of them was Daniel Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year. That year was 1665 and so it's surprising how relevant it is to our day. People acted the same then as now, ignoring advice and disobeying rules in order to do what they wanted. Even though it often led to the death of their whole family.
That plague of course was the Black Death and deadly it was. We are dealing with a virus that is deadly only to certain segments of the population. But whether spreading like wildfire or creeping around to strike nursing homes and meat processing plants, both have patterns of contagion.
The author of The Rules of Contagion: Why Things Spread -- and Why They Stop, Adam Kucharski, is a statistician who works at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. He has studied Ebola in Africa and various tropical diseases. But he is also interested in other things that are contagious like gun violence. Increase in violence in Rwanda, resembles disease spread in Somalia, for example.
A fascinating book, filled with new ideas (new to me) and potential solutions to problems involving the spreading of everything from financial bubbles to fake news.
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