 All residents are required to report to their designated quarantine rights have continued for a third consecutive day. How accurate do you think this particular scenario was? So we've learned in the first 15 minutes of this game that everything has gone very bad, very, very fast. What are your thoughts on how maybe accurate this representation is of what would happen in a terrible situation like that? In real life it would play out maybe over a period of weeks or months. And also, given the nature of an infectious disease, you can't have a global pandemic that suddenly kicks off in exactly the same time at every country in the world. So that even if parts of the US suddenly had this pandemic, the BBC would still be going, Twitter would still be going. The internet is built to be resilient, you can knock out various nodes, the whole point of it was designed to be resilient against failures. That element of it seems to be unrealistic and that's particularly the way in which we see disasters unfolding now. You see it happening on Twitter, people communicating about it. There's all sorts of ways in which people can get access to information outside of formal challenges. Why is it then that you think that game makers love the post-apocalyptic world? Well, there are many reasons. The biggest is probably that there aren't so many people around in the post-apocalypse. There are many things that are important to a video game that aren't necessarily linked to the narrative that work with the post-apocalypse, so you can control resources, for example. It lets you have familiar landmarks, present them in a new way, destroyed, overgrown, whatever. Obviously, when we're talking about the opening, there's a lot there that is unrealistic. I will bow to the experts. I think what's important about the way The Last of Us is presenting it is it's trying to give a very personal, ground-level view of how an unfolding pandemic might work. One thing I think they capture quite powerfully is the way that order in society is quite fragile. It's something that struck me particularly between five years ago, almost to the day when we had the riots in London. The fact that it turned out there are only a few thousand police. You've got several million people in London. When it pushed to come to shove, they were able to get less than 10,000 police on the streets. You realize that the number of police to the number of actual people in the society is so small that if everybody decides to go out at the same time and create problems or order breaks down, then things can go out of control within minutes, within hours. It's quite difficult to get that control back again. I think we see the army are involved in the National Guard or whatever they are in this instance. We don't see any police at all. We do see a lot of medical staff and a lot of ambulances flying about. Were something ever to happen, let's say today or tomorrow? Goodness me, how would it play out? What would be the first reaction of the emergency services or the government? What do we think we would do? Let's start with a pandemic like this. Well, let's say a pandemic like this. Why not? Let's go for it. Let's go 10 out of 10 on an awfulness rating straight away. Well, I don't know, but this is 11 out of 10 then in that case. What's the first thing we'd see, you think, from an infrastructure perspective? The first thing you do is you bring together the Cabinet Cobra Committee. That's the Cabinet Emergency Committee. I'm assuming there must be some kind of protocols for it. Some things in place so that part of a project I'm involved in at UCL and together with Public Health England and the various other universities is to create a pandemic early warning system, virtually to do things so that this never happened, so that you have a combination of observing what's happening on Twitter, Facebook, things that are openly available. You're putting together things like receipts from pharmacies, seeing whether there's a rise in people looking for certain sorts of meds and putting that information with doctors' appointments to work out or do we need to start vaccinating more people so that you can create a dashboard where you can see where the disease is moving where you need to put resources. So a lot of the game is about ensuring that it doesn't get out of control, but assuming it does get out of control then you have the Cabinet-level Committee Cobra, which is then going to bring the Army. I've asked one or two very, very senior people and the question has just been ignored as if I hadn't said it, but you discover all the ways in which we're being surveilled as part of the stuff that was revealed by Snowden and my assumption is, or at least my hope is, that things are in place to be able to use that information in order to help in the fight against infectious disease who really gets there, who really was a pandemic. They've got this massive amount of information about where people are, things spreading, who's saying what on the internet, which you could mine into real-time information about how a disease is spreading. If it was me at the heart of the government, that would be exactly what I'm doing. I don't know whether people are bright enough to have thought about that or whether they're only looking for spies or other kind of threats to it, because clearly the threat from a potential pandemic is much larger. You're talking about potentially millions of people dying rather than hundreds of people dying in the terrorist attack. So maybe we're thinking that in terms of, this has gone from one to 11 in 15 minutes obviously, I presume there's a little bit more there, you're thinking we'll know when it's a two or a three or appropriate resources where they need to go. Yes. But right from a medical perspective, what would happen in the first instance, do you think? The UK does have a pandemic strategy for things like influenza and for other sort of infectious diseases and obviously they have various threat levels. So I think a lot of it is about sort of planning as well because as well as people being secure also can have people off work and there's going to be that impact on kind of the workforce and the delivery. So it really is a lot of work sort of being done to try and ensure like a whole systems approach really to try and kind of address that. I mean, obviously a lot of the kind of public health England and NHS England stuff is around influenza in terms of something as dramatic as this. I'm not entirely sure how that would look, but there is certainly like a strategy in place that obviously we adapted and took lessons learned from the 2009 influenza outbreak. So, you know, there is kind of some infrastructure there. What sort of lessons are we thinking about then? Obviously you're right. This is entirely a hypothetical situation, but some real inverted comma scare quite similar. So you mentioned the sort of pandemic influenza. There was a lot of sort of big scare of that sort of 2009, 2010, I guess. And what lessons were learned from that, do you think? Well, there was obviously that with the swine flu there was lots of things to think about in terms of how much kind of medications like time and flu were, you know, stocked up and how accessible that was and how, you know, resources going to be impacted and kind of, you know, modelling work being done to identify potentially how many people would get sick in a scenario like that and lots of work being done with, you know, various businesses to kind of ensure workforce maintenance and, you know, it's the infrastructure that's going to be quite key in terms of, you know, everything from healthcare providers right through to can you still get shopping and can you still do things on a day-to-day basis? What would happen in the first instance? Personally, for me, I would be locking the doors, I would be closing the blinds, I would be putting heavy objects in front of the doors and not going out. Trying to look at the television, obviously the television's gone out there. What do we know about the sort of any research that's been done on what people tend to do and what do you think you would do if something like this happened? I mean, panic. That seems like the point one would be, freak out. I'm not really the man you want in charge. I think, you know, let's say rather than turning people into raging zombies we were dealing with the pandemic, it was very, very contagious. Something like that. You would want to avoid other people. It seems to me quite unnatural in that situation you'd want to be in the middle of a crowd where anyone could be. I also think, James made a great point about one of the themes of this introduction really is how fragile our social structures are, society kind of falling apart. And it makes this point very, very powerfully at the end because Sarah isn't killed by the pandemic. She's killed by the government. Panicking, not sure what to do. They just don't want people out of the perimeter so they open fire on a young girl. And stuff like that is what scares me far more than infectious diseases, to be honest. Really? So it's the, maybe I dare say, heavy-handed response to something we don't know what it is. Yeah, our social structures aren't necessarily set up to cope with, say, a very contagious disease that was also very fatal. Very fatal? Yeah, faithfully fatal, I think. And in that kind of scenario you might see, you know, feral behaviour, the kind of red and tooth and claw part of man's nature which in modern society is just not that close to the surface but is ready at any point. So you're the same as me. You're staying in, you're maybe a single... More or less, yeah. A single bead of sweat in the head. I'm trying to avoid large crowds and then we'll see how long I last. All right. And what about yourself? What do you think? Stay in. Yeah, stay in. I would definitely be staying in. Yeah? And me too.