‘We Haven't Yet Understood How Contagions Spread'

This admission may actually be the first step towards accepting the challenge of global health security, says writer Paolo Giordano

- Aasheesh Sharma

More than a decade ago, Rome-based physicist and novelist Paolo Giordano won Italy’s top literary prize, the Premio Strega, for The Solitude of Prime Numbers, his debut work of fiction. In February this year, Giordano’s report “The maths behind the contagion” went viral. With close to 3.5 million shares, it is credited with helping shift public opinion on the pandemic in one of the worst-hit nations of the world. His new book, written during the lockdown is a follow-up to the report. In an exclusive interview with MAIL TODAY, Giordano talks about similarities in particle physics and writing, climate change and why we should take the ‘theory of the Chinese laboratory’ with a pinch of salt. Edited excerpts.

Do you think politicians in Italy and the rest of the world wasted precious time bickering with each other before reacting to Covid-19 and this led to enormous suffering and casualties?

The bickering started later, after the shock. The first stages of the epidemic, in Italy as anywhere else, were mostly dominated by confusion and disbelief. Countries that went through SARS and MERS, such as Singapore and South Korea, showed instead a completely different level of readiness. While we were still debating whether Covid-19 was just another form of seasonal flu, the contagion gained speed. I blame disbelief in some governments, more than confusion: when the crisis was already clear in Italy, other countries very close to our borders behaved as if the virus couldn’t reach them. We proved unable to learn from each other.

Mathematics is a common thread running through your book. Can maths help the world understand the spread of contagions?