.EricTopol and cuttingforstone speak with chrischirp, professor of operational research UCL, about what we've learned and not learned from the COVID pandemic.
Hello. This is Eric Topol for Medscape. I'm with my co-host Abraham Verghese for a new edition of. We have an extraordinary guest today, Professor Christina Pagel. She is a force — a professor at University College London with an extraordinary background in math, physics, and even interplanetary space. We've never had a guest with such a diverse background. Welcome, Christina.You've provided extraordinary insights throughout the pandemic.
When I was 16, I had to choose between an arts or a science path. I loved both history and science. I picked science, but I never lost my love for history. It was the first time I'd chosen to do a course purely for interest. It had no impact on my career. I was doing it only for myself. It takes you back to the meaning of learning, I think, of trying to understand and find out things, and it's just so interesting.
After that came to light, the National Health Service decided to centralize the service, so only about 10-12 hospitals offer it. They did that because they wanted to ensure that there are enough operations happening every year in each of those hospitals. And they made it mandatory for everyone to submit their data.
So we're using these national datasets to really dig into it. It requires quite a lot of careful statistics and data, but also talking to clinicians, talking to patients, talking to parents. We've also built websites trying to explain what the data are and aren't showing. That's how I started thinking about how we present information that matters to people in a way that they find easy to understand and that's fair.
We have the world's leading health systems, so of course we'll be fine. And that wasn't the case. As societies become more medicalized — vaccinations, treatments, healthier lives — we've become used to a growing life expectancy, not as many infectious diseases, and not as many ubiquitous public health problems.
It's not that hard. It's just that people don't believe it. Somehow people think, oh, well, it can't happen. But what exactly is going to stop it? You have to have a mechanism to stop exponential growth at the moment when enough people have immunity. The moment doesn't last very long, and then you get these repeated waves.