The Rules of Contagion: Why Things Spread--And Why They Stop

It's a really good book for those that want to find out a bit about the math behind "contagion" spread. The book covers not only epidemiology but also much broader context of stock markets and social media and the mechanism behind something going "viral" while other not. This is not a book on biology, as it was written by a mathematician, but also not a book on mathematics. If you are like me - somewhat nerdy - you will become familiar with key terms and concepts in epidemiology, but you will need to look elsewhere for the detailed math behind them. If you are not into math, don't worry. The book is perfectly suitable for non-technical audience also.The primary area where it excels it at showing how many unknowns are in each model and how challenging it is to build a robust one. Author's opinions are also supported by his professional experience in disease monitoring. On overall a very enjoyable read.

This is an excellent and highly informative book. However, the Kindle version of this book is defective. At at least four points of the book, when the reader tries to the go to the next page, the entire Kindle system shuts down. This has not happened on any other Kindle book. Please correct this problem and give me (and other readers) a non-defective version of The Rules of Contagion. Thanks. Tom Mayer

Disclosure:1. I had purchased this book because I wanted to get some new insights into the nature of disease transmission as a result of the Ongoing Coronavirus Hysteria.2. Coronavirus was not quite the focus of this book, but there was some interesting peripheral information.If you were interested in information specifically about coronavirus, this book can only serve as a companion to some current periodicals that are being published about that disease. (I have in mind Alex Berenson books.)*******There is just so much going on in this book that is hard to keep track of it, and I would suggest that this is one of those books that you might read once and then put down and pick up a year later and read again. (Or take copious notes the first time around.)The prose is certainly very easy to read/nonfatty and it would not take too much reading time to reread this whole book.*******We do learn some things1. New terms and concepts:-Descriptive versus mechanistic methods.-Models are not evidence, and predictions are not data (p.141).-If you've seen one pandemic, you've seen one pandemic (p.3)-"Fake news" can mean more than one thing: clickbait/conspiracy theories/misinformation/disinformation (p. 204)-"Spark/growth/peak/decline" are the terms that are used in epidemiology to describe growth of a disease, and they are directly analogous to those used in microbiology to describe bacterial growth. (Lag / log / stationary / decay).2. Great (but forgotten) names of major contributors.Ronald Ross--responsible for figuring out about the distribution patterns of malaria. (And just as an example of how great the thinking was: he has no idea of the mechanism of action of the disease.).William Kermack- responsible for building sundry mathematical modeling tools--and he only started working on this after he was blinded and could not do experimental work later.3. The goal of people who spread misinformation on the internet is not to spread it to the maximum number of people, but instead for it to reach a person that is visible to many other people. (The easiest way to get people to believe that vaccines cause autism was not to repeat it a million times, but just to make sure that Pamela "Airhead" Anderson believed it. And the rest was a done deal.)4. The 80/20-Pareto rule (80% of outcomes <or outputs> result from 20% of all causes (or inputs for any given event.) works in epidemiology, as well.*******I do have some problems with the way that Kucharski overextends his theoretical apparatus to situations that aren't quite analogous to Epidemiology.-As when he applies the same treatment to violence (in places like Chicago) as to disease Epidemiology.The author seems to assume that everybody in the situations is genetically the same thing.Places like Kingston, Jamaica/ South Africa, Detroit / Chicago / Atlanta / St Louis all have huge amounts of crime, and they are also very full of black people.In the same way that it doesn't make any sense to discuss the behavior of the pathogen independent of a host, it doesn't make any sense to discuss some behavior that really does have to come through a biological substrate: violence is not going to spread through Chinese / Japanese people in the same way that it spreads through jamaicans, because they are just genetically not the same thing.-And as when he equates the 2008 US housing bubble to other panics, and then tries to use disease transmission models to explain them.*******A lot of philosophical questions.1. Once some government somewhere knows that an idea can spread in certain ways, is it such a bad idea for them to stop it?For example: The Chinese government is very aware that the internet can create a bunch of hysteria and also churches / mosques/ Falun Gong meetings are places where people can meet each other and then repurpose those meetings into some political movement. And so, the Public Security Bureau is all over those types of meetings. (The author does, in fact, get around to discussing the Chinese case. Page 197.)And, after reading this, it's not that they don't have a logical/ empirical case for behaving in the way that they do.The stupidity of the vaccine – autism link could never have caught on in China, but it did catch on in the United States with damage and spillover effects that are huge and ongoing.2. If somebody studied malaria susceptibility in two populations (one black/one Chinese), he would get very different ideas about the susceptibility of the population/"R value" of the disease.And the reason why would be a mystery until he realized that because of sickle cell trait a lot of black people have lower receptiveness to malaria.In that case, is "R" only an empirical value /impossible to generalize/ situational?3. In the case that you have a government with a huge, slow, lumbering bureaucracy for a government (let's choose the United States as an example), what can you really expect them to be able to do about preventing a spark of disinformation from starting a forest fire of fake news?There is the example of all of the many millions of dollars that were spent in Chicago trying to stop spreads of gang violence.And even after one year of all of that effort and all of those man hours-- they only stopped around 35 shootings and 5 homicides in Chi-Raq. (Oops! Sorry, I mean "Chicago." p.128)4. When can/can't you reinterpret everything as an issue of public health?The author gets into some strange efforts to define gun violence as a "public health menace." (You know, kind of the way that abortion is redefined as "reproductive health.") And he, in so many words, says what all left-wing intellectuals ALWAYS AND EVERYWHERE do which is: "Well, they do such and such in Europe and so why can't/ shouldn't it be that way in the United States?"5. Given that what you read in the newspapers is somewhere between 90 and 100% untrue, what is the best way to filter out fake news?-Maybe rely only on non mainstream sources?-Maybe just not bother about the news at all, and assume that if something is important that it will find its way to your ears? (NN Taleb does this, and I can say that it is quite tiring to pick up a newspaper and have to go through it with such a fine tooth comb because so little of the information is accurate.).-Maybe only deal with treatments that are in excess of 700 words? (>The length of New York "Fake News" Times?)*******Most germane (in the opinion of this reviewer) points from each chapter:1. Basics of epidemiology as it was discovered just over a century ago.2. Somewhat strained analogizing between financial hysteria (such as tulip mania), and poorly understood financial products (such as in the 2008 Real Estate Cris) and transmission of diseases (such as HIV and gonorrhea). These things are connected in that they have vectors, networks and contagion.3. Transmission of diseases is better explained by movement of vectors between space rather than imagining that the disease itself moves over all space universally. (In that case, San Francisco is further than China geographically, but much closer in terms of vector space than Barbados... Which is the opposite.) Speculation on the way that social contagions can be minimized by modifying the behavior of vectors.4. Attempts to model shootings in a place such as Chicago using epidemiological apparatus. Study of a program that tried to use certain techniques to stop shootings by treating them as a public health issue.5. Observations on the techniques of people that try to find ways to broadcast their message, viewed in terms of epidemiological concepts.6. Observations about hackers / computer virus coders choosing different vectors / mechanisms of action in order to deliver their virus payload. (Stuxnet. WannaCry. Mirai.)7. The direction of viruses is trackable over time/space based on changes in the genetic code. (It is cheaper and easier than it ever has been to sequence viruses.) The electronization of things such as medical records / GPS movements / license plates make it such that it is extremely easy to be found and extremely difficult to not be found.8. Recapitulation, conclusion, and speculation about the future direction that these unrelated threads could take. (Unrelated threads: banking crisis / gun violence / opioid use / computer viruses / diseases / privacy)Conclusions:1. In some sense, much "new" here is old: Mark Twain has said before (a century or so ago) that "a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes."Thomas Sowell has written one chapter in a book about "fictitious persons." He gave the examples of Clarence Thomas and Herbert Hoover, each of whom has a character that is created by journalists and historians by sheer force of repetition (p.203).2. It's pretty safe to say that the Internet is just a tool to facilitate what already happens very naturally: the spread of panic and misinformation.Verdict: Recommended

Adam Kucharski provides an important British perspective on the most topical event of today – the COVID pandemic – and so much more. He is a Professor at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, focusing on epidemiology. He is a mathematician by training, yet eschews equations in this book, though there are a number of useful graphs. More than half the book is NOT about the spread of infectious diseases. Kucharski also examines how other medical conditions, such as obesity and smoking are contagious. But more than half the book concerns the spread of “happenings,” as he calls them, from the loss of confidence in the financial markets to a “tweet” going viral, the operative expression for a particular thought (or gut reaction) rapidly spreading among people.If Kucharski had been an America of a certain age, he might have been very reluctant to place a graphic of falling dominos on the cover. That ill-chosen metaphor was the one used by American policy makers in the 50’s and 60’s to explain how communism was going to spread from China through Vietnam all the way to Sydney. The simplicity of that metaphor floundered on the reef of real-world considerations that a domino could not capture. The word “rules” in his title jars. There really are none, in the sense that there are “laws” that govern celestial mechanics. And if we know why things spread and why they stop, then why has Kucharski not provided a date that the current COVID pandemic will end? Or the next banking crisis begin? Because real-world considerations don’t graph well. Ideally, for those graphs and rules to work, human behavior needs to be invariable and without nuance; obviously it is not. Kucharski should have formulated a new and very large Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle for how things change when one attempts to measure them and grab some of the probabilities from Quantum Mechanics. Kucharski even provides the classic retort to his claim of “rules”: “If you’ve seen one pandemic, you’ve seen… one pandemic” (meaning that each is different).With that very substantial criticism aside, Kucharski has provided a very worthwhile and unique read, relating the factors involved in the spread of contagious diseases, financial panics and ideas in the social media. He provides a suitable lead in by providing the basis for his interest in epidemiology: as a child he had Guillain-Barré syndrome, an unusual condition that results in a malfunctioning immune system. Fortunately, he has almost fully recovered.Kucharski then commences with a history of my personal bugaboo, malaria, and the work of the British Army surgeon, Ronald Ross, who determined that it was transferred to humans by mosquitoes and not “bad air.” He relates some of Ross’ calculations on the spread of malaria, which stated with some precision that it would take 48,000 mosquitoes to generate one new human infection. What? From there Kucharski goes on to relate how the Zika virus was spread, and his personal work on the matter. In the second chapter he commences with Sir Isaac Newton’s quote: “I can calculate the motion of heavenly bodies but not the madness of people.” Amen. (Newton lost a lot of money when the South Sea Company bubble burst.) From there, Kucharski is soon discussing the financial panic of 2008.Kucharski does provide us an equation, of sorts. The “R” that we have heard so much about recently, which represents the number of new cases that will occur from one infected person, is determined by the “DOTS,” an acronym for “Duration,” “Opportunities,” “Transmission probability” and “Susceptibility.” The devilish problem of determining the coefficient for these four factors is omitted.Most of the book however concerns the contagion of “happenings” like obesity and gun violence. Each a very worthy subject in its own right, with even greater difficulty in determining those slippery, variable coefficients. Most informative also were the chapters on the many people who study our on-line behavior, sometimes for political motivation and the next election, sometimes in order to throw another ad in our face. I kept thinking of the tremendous energy put into such projects, like measuring baseball player stats, and wondered what the utility is, compared with determining the reason why people are unwilling to be vaccinated.Despite my substantial criticism, there are many useful anecdotes and possible tenuous connections posited, all for the neurons to refine. 4-stars.

Adam Kurcharski is someone who knows what he is talking about, after all he is an Associate Professor and Henry Dale Fellow at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, amongst other things, including publishing pieces in various science and other magazines and newspapers, as well as TED talks. As his wife works in advertising so he is someone who studying the spread of infection and trying to prevent it also sees how for his wife it is about trying to make things viral in another field.Thus this book blends trying to understand the spread of contagion, what causes it, trying to prevent deaths and infections, along with the spreading of information and such like on a technological platform, making this well worth reading. Unfortunately, the idiots at the moment who are stockpiling toiler paper and other products, not practising social distancing and isolation are those who should read this, but if they cannot understand why they should be doing these things, they will never understand this book.Taking in many different disciplines and showing how work in one field has helped in other ones so we see how although computer modelling can help to a degree, it will take much more information and mathematical equations to improve algorithms and of course you have to be able to factor in human stupidity. Taking us from work by Ronald Ross on combating malaria, we are taken through to others such as Robert Koch, John Snow, et al. With looking at medical science we can also get insights from studies into language and folktales, making for an absorbing read.This is so much more than a medical type text as we see not only the spread of viruses in the real world, but also those on-line, and how the work going on in tech companies are at times causing problems, such as trying to manipulate people and direct advertising, along with trying to spread misinformation and disinformation. All the components that make up this book will carry interest for lots of people and shows at times how things can get out of hand, even unintentionally, as well as more direct malicious approach. Taking in such things as the financial crisis and how many were wrong when they thought that major banks were too large to fail, so we can see how certain assumptions have been turned on their heads as well as also showing how viruses can jump species (such as COVID-19) and how further mutations can make things become resistant to antibiotics.In all this is at the present time a timely wake-up call for many and shows what advances we have made, and those that we still need to make if we want better control over pandemics and so on. Also, this shows unethical approaches that have led to results that are still used, and how we do not know how data collected about us is sometimes used.

writing in the midst of the COVID-2019 pandemic, this is a very good read to understand the progress of contagions but also the way (hopefully) they end.The book also covers viral information as well as medical outbreaks, and is very clearly written by a leading practioner (epidemiologist) who has a gift for explaining relatively complex processes in plain language.

As we are facing coronavirus worldwide. I decided to read this book. The yellow page of the book strike's right away.I enjoyed reading the book especially on how the false media and false information can be spread online as much as any virus.4* only because some paragraphs were too rocket science for me.

I heard the author speaking on the radio, and describing the four things that need to happen for someone to be infected by Covid19 (or anything else). I was impressed. DOTS stands for Duration of the infection in person A, the Opportunity to infection Person B (by being close, for instance); Transmission (the sneeze that contains the virus, perhaps); and then Susceptibility in Person B (if they have a weak immune system, maybe). The book gives you the history of the study of infection, including the development of the understanding of 'herd immunity' over a century ago. But the rest of the book is about the contagion of ideas (and posts going viral on the net), and I found that a distraction.

This is a good book if a little haphazardly structured. The timing of publication is incredibly fortuitous as it's a topic of international interest. Viral pandemics is obviously a type of contagion and gets plenty of coverage in the book which looks at contagion in general and defines lots of terms that we hear every day like "herd immunity". It then moves on to lots of examples in all sorts of areas ranging from fake news and computer viruses.With a tighter structure and a more well-defined theme, this could have been a really good book. It's still good and well worth reading, and I feel more well-informed for having done so.