WFHB Bloomington Community Radio
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Our conversation (recorded on 4/17) highlights the way we think about medical, social and policy responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. An event like this reveals a “complex system” of interactions at the intersection of economics, social systems, and the disease itself.
The goal is to try to attain some lucidity in the face of innumerable speculations about the novel coronavirus, COVID-19, by defining many of the terms that are being used to discuss it. These are complex issues and there needs to be a more basic understanding of primary concerns.
To do that we’ll focus on things like the R0 value or the basic reproduction number, contact tracing, super-spreaders, herd immunity, the length of time we might expect the pandemic to continue, and the likelihood of a resurgence (not once but twice).
We’ll also take a look at the technological solutions on offer that might be utilized to enable a return to a closer-to-normal version of economic activity. These digital surveillance applications, though, raise real privacy concerns for many. However, and this may be a surprise to you, you are not legally well-protected when it comes to privacy protections in the first place.
Finally, what is stressed is the way that all of these considerations must take place within a global and networked world order. A pandemic doesn’t just affect those who are ill – for example the consequences reach into food systems and supply chains, far more fragile than we might suspect.
GUEST
Samuel Scarpino is an Assistant Professor in the Network Science Institute at Northeastern University. Scarpino’s research spans a broad range of topics in complex systems and network science, including: infectious disease dynamics, forecasting and predictive modeling, complex network analysis, disease genomics and transcriptomics, outbreak surveillance, social networks, gene network evolution, and decision making under uncertainty. He also directs the Emergent Epidemics Lab which investigates questions using mathematical and computational methods from biology, statistics, physics, applied mathematics, and computer science.
RELATED
Emergent Epidemics Lab
Santa Fe Institute
Herd Immunity Won’t Come Anytime Soon for COVID-19
The Deceptively Simple Number Sparking Coronavirus Fears (The Atlantic)
MUSIC – Kris Davis, pianist and composer
“The Slightest Shift” (The Slightest Shift)
“Stone’s Throw” (Diatom Ribbons)
“Twice Escaped” (The Slightest Shift)
“Evidence” (Massive Threads)
“I Needed It Yesterday” (Too Many Continents – Nick Fraser)
CREDITS
Producer & Host: Doug Storm
Episode Producer: Bradi Heaberlin
Audio Editor: Sean Milligan
Executive Producer: Kade Young
