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I have been following COVID-19 since January. Here was my first post http://www.duncanrobertson.com/2020/01/24/contagion-how-to-model-it-and-what-r0-actually-means/ describing R and referring to what was then called Wuhan Coronavirus (2019-nCoV)
I based my Policy and Strategy Analytics MSc course at @LboroSBE around COVID-19 and each week I would update students on the spread of COVID-19 and introduce a model for how we can analyze the spread of the virus. Here's my introduction slide from early February
I have been working on spatial transmission models for over 20 years. Here's one of my papers showing different models and methods for simulating the spread of diseases such as COVID-19http://www.duncanrobertson.com/2018/05/15/spatial-transmission-models-a-taxonomy-and-framework/
I wanted to communicate the concept of social distancing when it was not yet in common use. Here's a film I made in March based on 1970s UK Public Information Films
This was picked up by the media, and as well as having been interviewed for several national media outlets, I started a weekly interview on BBC Local Radio @BBCLeicester . Here's the archive https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZaBATt7i_4tvXWrsgT-h4Q/videos?view_as=subscriber - weekly interviews since March giving a chronology of COVID-19
My first interview was just after @MRC_Outbreak had produced a prediction of COVID-19 spread in the UK. This was alarming. https://www.imperial.ac.uk/mrc-global-infectious-disease-analysis/covid-19/covid-19-reports/
At the time, the UK had not woken up to the threat. COVID-19 was considered a problem in Italy and China, and not yet significant in the UK. I wrote a letter in the @FT explaining my concerns http://www.duncanrobertson.com/2020/03/31/covid-19-letter-published-in-the-financial-times/
We are now at a very similar stage. As I write, there are no COVID tests available. No tests at all. The disease is starting to rear its ugly head in the UK http://www.duncanrobertson.com/2020/09/08/should-we-be-concerned-about-covid-transmission-in-young-people-yes/ and we are sitting by, being distracted by (albeit critical) politics.
This disease has not and will not go away. I fear we are right back where we were in the spring, hoping that public relations and politics will defeat COVID-19. It will not. I reiterate what I said back in March: “Muddling through” does not work for pandemics.
