The Rules of Contagion by Adam Kucharski

The Rules of Contagion: Why Things Spread--And Why They Stop by Adam Kucharski
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Like a lot of people said, this both about viruses spreading and about information/misinformation/disinformation spreading. It's sort of the perfect book for our time in that both of those things are a danger right now. But the organization was really poor and there were only a few new things covered.

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 “We received a new dataset each day. Because it took time for new cases to be reported, there were fewer recent cases in each of these datasets: if someone fell ill on a Monday, they generally wouldn’t show up in the data until Wednesday or Thursday. The epidemic was still going, but these delays made it look like it was almost over.” 

 “R = Duration × Opportunities × Transmission probability × Susceptibility” 

“Epidemiology is, in fact, a mathematical subject,’ he wrote in 1911, ‘and fewer absurd mistakes would be made regarding it (for example, those regarding malaria) if more attention were given to the mathematical study of it.’” 

 “Tackling harmful content will have a direct effect – preventing a person from seeing it – as well as an indirect effect, preventing them [from] spreading it to others. This means well-designed measures may prove disproportionately effective. A small drop in the reproduction number can lead to a big reduction in the size of an outbreak.”