Show simple item record

Viral spreading in a small world

dc.contributor.authorMurugan, Jeff
dc.contributor.authorWeltman, Amanda
dc.date.accessioned2020-03-13T12:35:39Z
dc.date.available2020-03-13T12:35:39Z
dc.date.issued2020
dc.identifier.urihttp://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11911/141
dc.description.abstractAs we write this, the world is in the midst of a pandemic, the worst of at least 100 years, and the first in the era of widespread social connectivity. Humanity has certainly overcome pandemics before. The Black Plague, for example, decimated a significant proportion of the world’s population, and the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918 – our first encounter with the H1N1 virus – killed more than 40 million people worldwide over a period of just under a year, yet epidemiologists the world over are bracing for the next “big one” and wondering if the world can survive it. But why? Surely today we are far more aware of how viruses spread, of the role that hygiene plays in their containment, of how to sequence viral RNA and produce vaccines or antiviral drugs in record time? Well, it turns out that with the leaps in technology that have come since the Third Industrial Revolution, we now live in a world that is more connected than ever before and with this global connectivity comes an unprecedented risk of global spread of disease. As the world scrambles to contain outbreaks like Ebola in 2014, or Covid-19 in 2020, the role of doctors, virologists, and even politicians are intuitively obvious. But what could mathematicians, or more precisely applied mathematicians, possibly contribute to this calculus? In a word: Modelling.en_ZA
dc.language.isoenen_ZA
dc.publisherSouth African Journal of Scienceen_ZA
dc.subjectModellingen_ZA
dc.subjectMathematiciansen_ZA
dc.subjectCovid-19en_ZA
dc.titleViral spreading in a small worlden_ZA
dc.typeArticleen_ZA


Files in this item

Thumbnail

This item appears in the following Collection(s)

  • C. ASSAf Policymakers' Booklets14

    Policymakers’ Booklets are summaries of Consensus Study Reports aiming at making scientific information accessible to policymakers and the general public.

Show simple item record