Modelling can only tell us so much: politics explains the rest

Abstract

I’ve been self-isolating with my family because we developed fevers. Whether this is any illness or coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is hard to say given the UK Government’s position on community testing. How this infection started, how many people I might have infected, and how adhering to public health guidance to remain at home alters patterns of disease transmission is crucial information. For this knowledge, policy makers need epidemiologists and mathematical models of how diseases spread in different populations, as described by Adam Kucharski in The Rules of Contagion: Why Things Spread— and Why They Stop.