Reducing Covid-19 to zero: “Right now, there are places that are on fire and there are sparks that are flying to other places”
US physicist Yaneer Bar-Yam has specialised in studying complex systems such as pandemics and financial crises. In January he wrote an influential paper with Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the author of a best-selling book called The Black Swan, warning that the novel coronavirus emerging in China threatened the world. Bar-Yam has been paying close attention to Ireland's coronavirus response and argues that the best approach once the number of new cases has been brought near zero is to cut off routes for any fresh infection to spread. He tells Thomas Hubert: "You want to be as careful as possible to limit the possibility of starting a new fire and what you want to do is to limit travel as much as is reasonably possible and to quarantine people that arrive carefully so that they don't start a new outbreak."
