17 May

Was laying in bed this morning thinking about how epidemics just start and stop, and nobody knows why. And I thought, these microbes are working together, they're communicating somehow. When I got up, I did a bit of research, and saw that only in the past 3 or 4 years, 'sociovirology' was invented. Turns out this is EXACTLY what microbes are doing. The decision to start and stop an epidemic is a social one, made by the viruses and bacteria, as a group, not individually. If we want to understand epidemics, we need to use our own social lives, which also go 'viral' often. This isn't just playing with analogies, understanding those social processes is the key to beating epidemics, I'm sure of it. Quarantine, for example - does it work because it stops viruses talking to each other? The beauty of this is, you don't need to be a scientist to figure it out. What makes our own social lives go viral? And what stops that? That will be our answer. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-01880-6