The exponential growth of COVID-19 is threatening to bring down the world economy. To understand the pandemic, Azeem Azhar chats with professor Yaneer Bar-Yam, President of the New England Complex Systems Institute, who worked on the response to Ebola with pioneering complex-systems mathematics.

In this conversation, they discuss:

• Why we need to crush, rather than flatten, the curve.
• What lessons the Ebola outbreak offers us for dealing with COVID-19.
• What complexity mathematics offers beyond traditional epidemiological modelling.

Further reading:

• “A Better Way: Building Capacity, Adaptation and Resilience” (Exponential View, 2020)
• End Coronavirus: Map, Guidelines, Community (2020)
• “Coronavirus: The Hammer and the Dance” (Tomas Pueyo, 2020)
• “Transition to Extinction: Pandemics in a Connected World” (Yaneer Bar-Yam, 2016)

@yaneerbaryam

Exponential View newsletter

Note: a previous version of this episode included an excerpted conversation with Dr. Adam Kucharski, author of “The Rules of Contagion: How Things Spread – and Why They Stop.” That excerpt has now been removed, and the full conversation with Dr. Kucharski can be found here: https://www.exponentialview.co/p/-modeling-the-pandemic.