'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 in an interview that I did for the Books section of Mail Today this morning

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. Confusion is somehow comprehensible, as this is a brand new situation for most Western countries. 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 published last month just before the enormity of the pandemic dawned on the world. Can maths help the world understand the spread of contagions?

Mathematics first of all helps us understand a key concept, which is at the root of everything that has happened and continues to happen: we are more than 7 billion human beings in the world and this new virus would like to and could infect us ALL. With such a large number of susceptibles’, any rate of lethality or hospitalisation risks producing unimaginable disasters if we do not proceed with caution. So yes, the underlying problem is on the one hand biological (the novelty of the virus) and on the other mathematical (how many we are).

In the first few weeks, then, mathematics was needed to imagine what might happen, when the contagion was still talked about in the ‘abstract’. At some point theoretical discussions were replaced by reality, but even now – weeks into the pandemic – our lives are still governed by this new maths, and they will be for a long time. We have been living in the company of numbers for two months now: the number of infected, the number of dead, the number of people who have recovered, the number of people in intensive care and so on. And we've all become familiar with the concept of R-nought, the basic reproductive number: we had never heard of it before and now the value of R decides what we can and cannot do next week.

Having even minimal knowledge of how to read and interpret all this mathematics is essential to make our reaction appropriate to the situation, to have the right expectations and not be continually disappointed.

Does the reaction of the world to Covid-19 which is an imminent and immediate threat, inspire some hope that the world will become more conscious of its choices in terms of the long-term threat of climate change?

I hope so. This is a rehearsal for the kind of cooperation required to combat climate change. So far we haven't done very well. As we said at the beginning, each country has acted independently; at times there have been uneven approaches within individual states – including in Italy – and that sense of disbelief has been replicated everywhere. But we also witnessed examples of fruitful cooperation, such as that of the scientific community, which for once is in the spotlight. We can learn from them. We must do everything we can to ensure that the universalism of the scientific spirit also pervades our institutions and our politics. We have suddenly realised that health security is a global problem that needs to be addressed with a truly global approach. We know that the same goes for climate change. But the challenge of climate change is even more difficult, because its effects are more elusive, slow, contradictory, seemingly distant. If we want to do it, a new vision must be put forward now, from within the pandemic.

The blame game between the WHO, USA and China over apportioning guilt for the virus was in bad taste. How do you view China's role in retrospect, since the pandemic began?

I believe that there is still a lack of evidence to assess the situation as a whole.

Of course, every aspect will have to be clarified in due course, accurately and impartially. So far this has not been the approach: it’s been chaotic, obscure, based on prejudice. I have not yet read a single convincing evidence of the ‘theory of the Chinese laboratory’, yet prominent individuals have embraced it, with the direct result that many already believe it. This has created enormous damage, drawing away attention from the much more plausible links between environmental destruction and epidemics to focus instead on an easy scapegoat. Creating a new collective consciousness is very difficult and tiring. A tweet is all it takes to dismantle it. It's an unequal struggle, unfortunately.

At the same time, with regard to China, there has been a great deal of confusion between the epidemiological discourse and the moral one. This happened in Italy, too: when there was talk in February of blocking flights from China because of the risk of contagion, those who promoted the idea were accused of racism. In truth, it was a sensible prophylaxis measure, racism had nothing to do with it. The result of the discussion was that direct flights were blocked, but not those connecting from other parts of the world. We struggle not just to solve problems, but to choose the right paradigms with which to deal with them.

You are a scientist as well as fiction writer and author. How do you reconcile between your non-fiction based on scientific reasoning and your novels?

I have never needed to reconcile the two worlds, I think they have never been separate. I stopped doing scientific research in a ‘direct’ way ten years ago, but I continued to take an interest in science. In fact, moving away from a specific area like particle physics has allowed me to explore others: ecology, sociology, psychology and medicine, above all.

And science has always been in my novels. More than that: it has always shaped my novels. In the latest, Heaven and Earth, which will also be released in English this summer, there is an epidemic (it affects trees, not humans) and there are conversations about the relationship between man and the environment.

Is your writing routine during the it different from your usual writing rituals? Do you write at any particular hours of the day, long-hand or into the laptop?

For me, it was mostly reading that changed in quarantine. Since the beginning of the epidemic I have not been able to read fiction, but only news, news, news. I've never been so at the mercy of reality. It's a crucial moment, where a lot of things are changing quickly, so I don't want to miss anything. I have a notebook and every day I write new reflections and observations. And I write more than usual, with a different urgency, at all hours.

7.     Finally, nations such as the United States, Spain and Italy have seen far more deaths from the contagion so far than South Asian countries such as India. Do you think the virus affects different parts of the world differently?

I'm not a virologist or an epidemiologist, so I don't speak on these issues. For sure, this virus carries with it an extraordinary charge of novelty. We have not yet fully understood the symptoms, which are very varied. And even the hypotheses about the way the virus behaves in different climatic conditions are completely circumstantial.

It is very difficult for us to stop in this uncertainty and admit that we don't know. Not knowing is  a condition we were not used to anymore, but it is necessary, in order to adequately deal with this virus, to return to having a relationship with everything we ignore.