There were even isolated incidents of players deliberately trying to spread the virus – we haven’t seen that in the real world, thankfully, although NBA player Rudy Gobert was heavily criticised for deliberately touching microphones and recording devices at a press conference a couple of days before testing positive for Covid-19. Some tried to be “first responders,” Lofgren says, travelling to the epicentre of the epidemic and trying to heal players who were infected – but this often meant contracting the disease themselves and then spreading it – we’ve seen parallels of this with healthcare workers becoming sick and passing away due to a combination of the coronavirus and general exhaustion.Īs news of the outbreak spread, some people logged on to the game to see what the fuss was about, and promptly became infected themselves. For powerful characters, the disease was no more troubling than a common cold, so they just went about their daily lives – but ended up spreading it to areas where more vulnerable players quickly died from it. There are echoes of Corrupted Blood in the way the coronavirus spread from remote to urban areas, and in some of the behaviour we’re seeing in the worst hit countries. Here we get the full view of human irrationality.” “The people in those simulations only act the way we tell them to act.

“Traditionally when we do computer-based simulations we know everything about the world,” says Lofgren, who published a 2007 paper on the Corrupted Blood outbreak with colleague Nina Hefferman. But we’re pretty irrational creatures – few would have predicted, for instance, that fans barred from attending the recent Champions League football match between Borussia Dortmund and Paris Saint-Germain would gather outside the stadium anyway, or that Ukrainians would voice their fear at a quarantine centre being set up in their area by going to the quarantine centre and throwing stones at a bus carrying evacuees from Wuhan.

That’s really crucial, because a lot of the models that scientists use to try and predict how a disease like Covid-19 will spread are built on assumptions about the way people will behave.

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