Back in the early years of this millennium, a new dinner party game sprang up called ‘Six degrees of Kevin Bacon’. A play on ‘six degrees of separation’, the concept is that you are only six connections away from anyone in the world. Players are assigned a random actor and have to link them to Kevin Bacon via six or fewer films.  So George Clooney was in ‘Ocean’s Eleven’ with Julia Roberts who was in ‘Flatliners’ with…Kevin Bacon.

Whilst not being as well connected as the ubiquitous Mr Bacon, we are all part of networks of people.  

As Professor Niall Ferguson explains in his book ‘The Square and the Tower’, networks have existed before humanity. Think of insects such as ant colonies, conveying information to each other such as where food is or where predators are.

In humans, Professor Ferguson argues, big changes rarely happen due to hierarchical structures imposing them – for example, the ‘Great Man’ theory of history – but rather due to networks. The nodes (us), the edges (our connections) and the interactions between us explain how ideas have spread throughout history and changed the course of the world.

Network science suggests that ‘birds of a feather flock together’; we tend to be in groups with common interests. This explains how the Reformation sprang from a few disgruntled German clerics to the rest of the world, carried to others by the new invention of the printing press. Or how a small group with a mutual interest in improving the efficiency of steam engines in Britain helped accelerate the enormous changes of the Industrial Revolution.   

BUT NETWORKS CAN ALSO CAUSE HARM

When we think about how and why the coronavirus spread so far and so fast, there is the biological aspect, such as how infectious it is and the now famous ‘R’ or ‘Reproduction’ number, and the fact that we humans have no inherent immunity. But it doesn’t spread on its own – it is carried by people and their movements. When something goes viral like this it is all about our networks.

Just as the Black Death came to Europe via overland trade routes such as the Silk Road and by sea merchants, so the coronavirus spread rapidly through the world. The earliest case came from the Chinese city of Wuhan, an enormous agglomeration of 12 million people which was connected to the world by its roads, trains and airport. The New York Times, using phone and flight data, estimated that 7 million people left Wuhan during the month of January before the travel ban kicked in, heading off to celebrate the Lunar New Year holiday. It was connected to China and the world by almost a hundred direct flight routes, including those to London, Rome and New York.

As governments across the world adopted a number of solutions in an effort to slow and contain the spread of Covid-19, they turned to the big tech giants and telecom companies for help.

The use of our personal data is once again in the spotlight. Governments leaned on insights generated from this data in efforts to effectively slow the spread of the virus. How can they be sure citizens are adhering to lockdown measures? How can citizens be warned if they have been in close proximity to people known to have the virus? How can they mitigate further outbreaks as well as future pandemics? Here we take a look at the power of data in the fight against the global pandemic, where our mobile phones hold the key to answering many of these questions. 

Using mobile phone data to combat infectious diseases is not a new development. Mapping subsets of a population across various locations has already proven to be extremely effective in monitoring existing deadly diseases such as Malaria and Ebola. You can look back to 2007, and the World Health Organisation’s initiative to eradicate Malaria on the island of Zanzibar and the spread across mainland Africa.

They utilised location data from mobile phones, provided by various Tanzanian telecom companies, to assist them in detecting the originations and spread of the disease. This approach has since been replicated across the continent and has been significantly drawn on in efforts to combat the spread of Covid-19.

The concept is known as ‘contact tracing’. Our smartphones continually track our every movement and location, utilising cell-tower signals, WiFi and GPS (Global Positioning System) to do so. Asian countries were particularly quick to draw on the insights that could be gained by such analysis, particularly when combined with medical data. Singapore and South Korea provide good examples where mobile phone applications have been used effectively. Through monitoring of citizens’ locations, users have been alerted when the technology deems they have been in close proximity to others confirmed to have had the virus, and thus able to take steps to self-isolate. Location data has also been used extensively in Asia to ensure people adhere to lockdown rules. Experts say this has been central to their success, with comparably low death rates than those of Western economies. However, such an approach is clearly highly invasive.

In Europe, certain countries have since adopted measures to utilise location data. In major cities such as Milan and Madrid, telecom providers have assisted in creating heat maps of their respective population’s location data, to monitor and report how lockdown has successfully restricted movement. Italian data, for example, demonstrated that citizens were initially less obliged to follow protocols, with an estimated one million people travelling in and out of the city of Milan in the first week of their lockdown. At the time of writing, UK telecom operators such as O2, BT, and Three are in talks with the UK Government on how anonymised phone location data could be shared to better understand people’s movements, slow the spread and prevent resurgence.