How to Map a Virus

one of the hardest parts about containing the coronavirus is that we can't see it by using Americans to wear non-medical face coverings all we see are its effects the symptoms the spread the deaths how can you plan and prepare for something that you can't see well it turns out there is a way to see coronavirus to see how it spreads to look at its behavior there's a method for doing this and this is the story of how it works [Music] mapping an invisible killer like the corona virus is a science and an art and it's one that has its roots here in London in the mid-1800s in London loads of people were dying from some disease that no one understood it wasn't a virus like what we're seeing today but either way it was spreading and killing and no one really know how or even where it came from so they came up with a lot of theories all wrong which resulted in a lot of inaccurate health advice from using leeches to avoiding drinking cold water to a bunch of other really weird things that were totally wrong they really had no idea what was going on and yet people continue to get sick and die and then this guy shows up his proposition was fairly simple in theory if we just track every single person who gets sick and talked to them and hear what they did for the day and where they went and what they touch then we could assemble a map of this disease and understand it better this sort of data collection like mapping out sicknesses was not a huge part of medicine at the time medicine at the time was much more of a practice of smart doctors performing really technical procedures or giving health advice based on their knowledge it didn't incorporate much data science even still this guy Jon Snow was diligent in his effort to collect as much data about this invisible killer as he could the data pointed very clearly to this water pump where people were getting their drinking water every day turns out people were drinking water that was contaminated with human waste that was getting into the water source here at this pump they were being really sick with cholera that was being transmitted through water not through air this was a huge revelation and was totally made possible because John snow decided to go out and collect a bunch of data from a bunch of people fast forward 150 years and today we are kind of involved in a similar-looking puzzle the new corona virus which has now reached the United States firm that first two cases of probit 19 to a sin England donor virus yes Canada have its first case at the new corona virus the disease today is very different than cholera in the 1850s it's a virus for starters but what's the same here is that this thing is spreading around and leaving a deadly trail in its wake except for in today's case instead of trying to get visibility on a few neighborhoods in London health experts are trying to get visibility on entire countries and the entire world humans move a lot faster and further than they did in the 1850s and because of that something like this can spread a lot quicker but with that has also come new technologies that allow us to map a virus in a way that we weren't able to in the 1850s the New York Times put together this really amazing visualization using data published by Chinese telecom providers it shows people's travel patterns and helps piece together a story of how people move and how this virus left China and started to move around the world as you see the flow of people you can start to map the spread of the virus once the virus gets to your country the work of mapping it becomes a lot harder let's say you live in South Korea and you test positive for corona virus health officials interview you having you retrace your steps then they verify with GPS signals credit card transactions security camera footage to reconstruct a map of everything you touched every person you talked to buses you rode on any opportunity the virus had to jump from you someone else local health authorities are revealing the timelines and visited locations of confirmed cora virus patient's citizens are checking the coronavirus locations and are avoiding going to these areas they then isolate every person you were in contact with and interview them about everyone they touched following the trail mapping out the movements of the virus and trying to get ahead of this thing that you cannot see once in quarantine you can get an app on your phone that tracks your every movement ensuring that you don't go out and your find thousands of dollars if you do break this quarantine it's laborious painstaking resource intensive work but it's the only way to truly map a virus and get ahead of it and places like South Korea and Singapore have poured tons of resources into doing this and that's one major reason why South Korea who is 50 million people and tons of huge urban centers has a curve that looks like this whereas the United States has a curve that looks like this so why does the United States have a curve that looks like this why aren't they doing the same sort of intensive tracing that happened in South Korea or Singapore there are a lot of reasons why the u.s. is now the center of the pandemic one of the big reasons is that the US isn't totally willing to do what South Korea did in South Korea there's a pretty high trust in the government one poll found that 86 percent of South Koreans trust health advice coming from their government in the United States that's way down at 59 percent of people who trust the health advice from the US government in addition Americans aren't super into the idea of the government tracking them tracking their every movement asking them what they've been up to who they've talked to where they've been going this crosses a line of privacy and personal rights that is pretty sensitive in the United States as part of our culture and our ideology and is not as sensitive in places like South Korea so in South Korea you have people who trust the government and who are okay with the government implementing these really stringent intense methods for tracking and contain virus but honestly at the end of the day the major reason why the u.s. is not able to adequately track this virus to get ahead of it is because we're simply too late we did not act when there were just a few hundred cases and now with hundreds of thousands of cases we're too late this sort of intensive tracing the investigations that tracing of contacts takes a lot of effort and even just with a few hundred cases when you get up to hundreds of thousands of cases it becomes completely implausible and impossible to execute so for now we don't have a map of the virus we don't even have adequate testing to know exactly where it is and how it's spreading let alone containing those who have been in contact with infected people so we're flying a little bit blind which makes it that much more important for all of us to take these precautions that we've heard over and over again of distancing and facemasks this is all we can do without adequate data of where the virus has been and where it's going we have to rely on these widespread precautions to keep all of us safe and to stop the spread so don't go out wash your hands six feet away face masks etc etc without a map of the virus that's really our only hope I hope everyone watching this video has been able to stay inside and find ways to make use of all of this time not going out one thing I've been doing a lot of this learning new skills and learning about bread I'm learning new animation skills and that fits right in with a sponsor Skillshare Skillshare is an online learning platform where you can take classes on just about any topic you can think of and now is a great time to start to learn a new skill if you're into animation like I am I can recommend this course called animating with ease with Jake Bartlet it's a fantastic intro to creating more elegant and natural-looking animations I use the graph editor and a lot of the techniques taught in this course in my animations and I think if you're interested in animation something like this will be really really helpful because Skillshare is sponsoring this video they're offering my audience two months of free skill share meaning you don't pay anything for two months you can test it out see if you like it you can learn a new skill and after that if you do the yearly subscription I think it's like 10 bucks a month or less which is just incredibly cheap for the amount of skills you can learn on this platforms I really believe in this model of taking your learning into your own hands on your own time so check out scale share go to my link in the description and start learning something today stay safe stay smart and this whole crazy thing will pass I promise see ya [Music]

Channel: Johnny Harris

Views: 378,418

Keywords: Johnny Harris, Johnny Harris Vox, Vox Borders, Johnny Harris Vox Borders, Vox

Id: ZEWbOsRgV70

Length: 9min 56sec (596 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 14 2020