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Special report: The simulations driving the world’s response to COVID-19

How epidemiologists rushed to model the coronavirus pandemic.
  1. David Adam
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Factory workers in China eat their lunch under social distancing restrictions sitting on spaced out red stools

Staff at a car-manufacturing plant in Wuhan, China, observe social-distancing measures during their lunch break. Credit: AFP/Getty

When Neil Ferguson visited the heart of British government in London’s Downing Street, he was much closer to the COVID-19 pandemic than he realized. Ferguson, a mathematical epidemiologist at Imperial College London, briefed officials in mid-March on the latest results of his team’s computer models, which simulated the rapid spread of the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 through the UK population. Less than 36 hours later, he announced on Twitter that he had a fever and a cough. A positive test followed. The disease-tracking scientist had become a data point in his own project.

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Nature 580, 316-318 (2020)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-020-01003-6

Additional reporting by Richard Van Noorden.

Updates & Corrections

  • Correction 03 April 2020: An earlier version of this article incorrectly referred to SimCity instead of The Sims video-game series.

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