Two years before COVID, Professor Devi Sridhar described almost exactly how a pandemic would reach the UK from an infection crossing from an animal to a farmer to a plane. Yet Western countries met the virus with what she calls a lack of humility, debating whether it was "just like flu" while East Asian nations, scarred by SARS and MERS, simply started running. The result: repeated lockdown-and-release cycles, economic damage, and misinformation spreading faster than facts.
In this wide-ranging conversation, the University of Edinburgh global health professor and government adviser lays out the strategic choices facing countries, elimination, suppression or mitigation, and why strong suppression is also the fastest route to economic recovery. She weighs the role of testing, tracing and contact-tracing apps, praises the transparent, science-led communication that has built public compliance, and sketches how the pandemic might end. Her tone stays hopeful: a rough winter ahead, but beach parties and a rethink of who society truly values on the other side.
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Welcome back to Turing Fest. We, a quick recap on what happened earlier earlier in the week. On Tuesday with three talks, three keynotes, one from Roan Lavery from FreeAgent talking about great talk, about focusing on the challenges and benefits of giving people autonomy in teams.
Andy Jarvis from XML Marketing talked us through the psychology of persuasion, and former Microsoft and Google product manager, Itzmar Gillad, gave us a really in-depth look at a framework he calls just as an alternative to traditional roadmaps for product development. So three talks really packed full of wisdom and lessons pretty dense, probably quite a lot to take in if you watch them all back to back at the time, well worth digging into again and revisiting loads to learn.
Earlier today, we had a bunch of roundtables, just roundtable discussions. So thanks to our hosts, Mike Groves, Andy Jarvis and Christian Arno. We also had a drop in session that we just started doing this week to see how that would go. Hosted by my colleague, Tanya.
And a few of you caught up there and had a chat over coffee, which which is nice to see. So if there are any other topics, by the way, that people would like to see covered in the roundtables, etc, please drop us a note, you know, dying to hear from you on that because it helps us give you what you want.
So to wrap up this week, we have an interview. And it's an interview that I've been looking forward to for months since since we got it confirmed. The subject matter, as you'll see, it's a departure, certainly for TuringFest, we're not really talking about tech, we're not really talking about building companies, but we are talking about something that is affecting everybody right now.
And I think you'll see when you get into the interview why why the person we're speaking to is the perfect person to talk to right now. She's Professor of Global Health at the University of Edinburgh. She's an advisor to the British government, the Scottish government and other governments around the world.
She's been one of the calmest, most authoritative, compassionate, informative voices throughout this whole COVID situation. Well worth a follow on Twitter, by the way. We recorded this conversation earlier today. It's fascinating. So let's get into it and get over and speak to Professor Debbie Shreedhar.
Okay, so Debbie, thank you so much for joining us today. When when I was doing the programming for the conference this year, you know, we normally bring in people like CEOs of tech companies or engineers doing all these things or whatever. And health policy experts, you know, in other years don't normally feature very strongly.
But I've been since since all of this kicked off in in March, I've been I've been glued to your Twitter feed, frankly. I think you're probably the person who tweets I read the most. And it's been you've been so informative and reassuring without being, I guess, like patronizing or, you know, promising miracles or anything like that.
So so thanks for all of that. Maybe give us a quick a quick background on your your background and how you got came to be in Edinburgh, and then we'll we'll dive into a whole bunch of things. Perfect, and thank you for having me.
And I'm really honored to hear that you read my tweets because you write these things and you wonder is anybody actually reading them out there? Or are they actually helping anyone with information? So yes, so I'm a professor now at the University of Edinburgh Medical School and I run a research team.
We've been working now for several years on global health security and infectious disease management, largely in poor countries in Haiti, Senegal, India, Tanzania, South Africa, trying to understand how to best manage outbreaks in low resource settings. Before that I was at Oxford and then before that I'm from Miami.
And so basically I left Miami after doing my university studies there and then traveled north to England and then traveled further north to Scotland. And probably in five years, you'll find me near the North Pole, having fully completed my migration from the south to the the northern part of the world.
Yeah. We have a friend of mine and a a partner in Turing Fest, a regular speaker, John Peebles. He he used to live in Florida, and he traded it for Scotland. And he he actually said it was because of the weather. So he's the only person I know who ever moved to Scotland for the weather.
I didn't move that far. Yeah. Same. Same. So back in two thousand eighteen, you spoke at a conference called the Hay Festival, And you said, and I'm I'm gonna I'm gonna quote this, the greatest threat to the UK is someone in China who has been infected from an animal that has received antibiotics to improve its growth, which is then transferred to the farmer, which is transferred to the community.
That person gets on a plane to the UK, what good is it for the UK to be worrying about what is just happening here. So that was a pretty incredible prediction for exactly what's unfolded in twenty twenty. But we seem to be stuck in this weird loop where we weren't ready for what's happened, and we don't seem to be handling it that well, in this part of the world, versus when we look around, you know, New Zealand is is seems to be back to broadly regular life,
Southeast Asia as well. What what are your views on how how Europe, the West has handled COVID versus versus other parts of the world? Well, I think what we've seen in European countries as well as North American countries is a lack of humility in the face of an infectious disease.
This is why we've had all the debates of, is it just like flu? Because the worst thing people could think of is what kills the most people each year is flu. Whereas countries in West Africa, they know what Ebola did to their countries, to their societies, to their economies.
So they started running very early. East Asian countries had that impact of SARS, even MERS in the case of South Korea to other coronaviruses that are far more deadly. So I think in the, I remember thinking about this in February because WHO announced a emergency thirtieth of January, that's the highest alarm bell.
So that's the point in which countries should start running because that's WHO alerting the world, this is a huge deal. This is pandemic potential. And what you found is there was just complacency in Western countries. Like it couldn't happen here. It's never happened here.
It's never happened here. So I think we're paying very severely for underestimating this virus. I think it would have been, if we look now reflecting nine, ten months later, the countries that took a SARS approach, meaning elimination, just get rid of the virus, drive it low through hard measures and keep your testing and tracing and your border measures are largely back to normal with their economies growing.
The countries that are going between a flu approach, which is like you let have a certain level of acceptable spread and a suppression approach of trying to keep numbers low so your hospitals aren't overwhelmed are kind of here nor there. And that's European countries and really struggling and probably are gonna be in cycles of lockdown and release for quite some time.
You mentioned the the WHO there. And it feels like, yeah, it feels like it it hasn't been taken seriously. Or it it just feels like we're in this weird moment in the world where our our political structures, our social structures, the the way we interact, the way we consume media and information, it all seems to be a bit of a perfect storm.
Again, though, is that is that different in Asia? Or or how how has Asia reacted so much better? So I think there's two things there. One is this large amount of misinformation that's being driven by Facebook and Twitter and blogs, and that sometimes misinformation travels faster than facts.
And things that sound what people want to hear and react to emotionally seems to be picked up and clicked and liked more than things that are complex but true and evidence based. So you create the perfect conditions for misinformation to spread. And that's exactly what we've seen.
So what have we seen in Europe? Is this real or is it a hoax? That's gone on for a while. Even questioning if the virus exists. We've had, does it matter if your case numbers go up? We've had the virus will magically disappear.
We've had, if we just do nothing, herd immunity will appear and the virus will go away. We have had so many of these kind of fallacies put forward that have put us into circles and kind of this circular loop. East Asian countries didn't do that.
They saw this, they moved fast, they moved forward and they said, we're just gonna not live with this virus in our daily lives. We're gonna suppress it to a low level and hope other countries do that too. And WHO has had a real challenge in this because one of its biggest problems is misinformation.
It was already there pre COVID with the anti vaccination campaigns. People putting out, don't vaccinate your kids, which is why measles used to be eliminated in the UK and now actually it's no longer, it's lost that status because we have had outbreaks of measles because people are not vaccinating their children with the MMR vaccine.
So there is a history of misinformation. It's just been amplified in the current climate. And it is quite frustrating because it is putting us into these lockdowns and putting us back. And the thing I keep thinking of is who wins from uncontrolled spread?
Because uncontrolled spread is gonna lead to health services being stretched, school shutting, the economy being hurt because people get scared and they kind of retreat. Lack of trust in government and in authority because people are scared and don't trust anymore what they're hearing.
Why would you go down that path when actually there is a better one that East Asian has shown where you keep things open, you have economic growth and you keep your numbers low? Yeah. One of the recurring themes that seems to come up again and again is, and I think maybe it goes back to the point that we just we're really just not in Europe or in the west.
We're really not prepared for this. We've never really lived through it in any kind of recent time. But this can't we just keep the, you know, the health separating the health emergency from the economy And that kind of, I guess, it's a forced economy, really, isn't it?
Yeah. I mean, to be fair to economists, they've been saying this from the start. And, you know, I listen carefully to people who earn other fields in mind, to complement my expertise. So I've listened to education specialists, I've listened to immunologists and also to economists.
And if they had said to me, these public health interventions are going to destroy the economy and lead to massive unemployment and you really need to rethink them. I would have really taken it on board as would have governments, but that's not what economists are saying.
They've been very clear that the fastest way to economic recovery is through strong suppression of this virus. And while in the short term restrictions do indeed hurt the economy, in the long term it's the virus hurting your economy more than the restrictions. And I feel like that message has been lost, that it is the virus and spread of this virus which is going to paralyze your economy rather than just these lockdown measures, which, of course, also add additional costs.
But they wouldn't be needed if you have an appropriate strategy to deal with this in the medium to long term. Something that in the in the early days of the pandemic, it feels like we've been doing this for so long. The early days, seems like a long time ago, was there was a lot of talk about use of technology and technology in the sort of consumer sense, so apps on people's phones.
And then we've we've seen that emerge in lots of places. I've got the Scottish NHS app on my phone. I've never had any interaction with it. So I'm assuming it's all okay, but who knows? But if have we missed an opportunity with technology?
Is there more that technology could be doing to help? Yeah, I mean, I think technology is not the silver bullet, but it's definitely part of the solution and there are ways it can help. So the NHS Scotland app, as well as the one that's used in England can help with tracing.
So ideally, but this requires someone to actually go into the app and input their code when they test positive to alert others. So it does also rely on humans and human behavior to enable the app can help, but it's not the solution on its own.
I mean, the other way we've seen East Asia use apps is to help with isolation. So in the West, we've had really a trust system, which is someone says to you isolate for fourteen days and then kind of hopes that people comply with that in the goodwill, they don't wanna pass it on to others.
Whereas in East Asia, there are apps where let's say three times a day you get contacted by the app and you have to put in quickly a code and that code will be linked to your GPS location to make sure you are at home and at the address that you've given.
Some may see that as an infringement on privacy, but I mean, that's the cost for South Korea never going into a lockdown, for example, or Taiwan never going into a lockdown. Your test trace isolate means quarantining just those who have the virus and not exposing infectious individuals to others.
And they have said, well, that path is better than quarantining your whole population and lock downing everyone assuming everybody has the virus and trying to break chains that way. So there's no good option here. There's a lot of least bat the the the least worst option is what you're kind of looking for.
And so that's the path they've taken using apps and using technology. Yeah. It it seems like there's a there's a difference in how Scotland has has approached COVID to the rest of the UK. And one of the things that's been noticed, just on my personal opinion, but Nicholas Sturgeon being on on TV every day giving updates, etcetera, I don't know if it's if it's help how helpful it is.
Well, it's I don't know how helpful the Scottish government's approach to this, and maybe we can talk about that. But just given the fact that she is communicating and telling people what's going on and there's some sort of authority figure there, somebody's at the wheel kind of thing.
But it feels like in a lot of places around the world where we're sort of missing that, how do you think Scotland's been doing? Well, and actually communications is absolutely crucial in infectious disease responses. This is why you've had, for example, in African countries, radio show hosts being drawn in to kind of spreading health messages.
You've had plays being put on musicals, trying to communicate health messaging, communication is absolutely essential. We looked at a Lancet paper looking at what are the three components of good responses and one is good communications. And yeah, I mean, Nicholas Sturgeon's been, I think remarkable.
She hasn't taken a holiday this whole summer until now. She's every day just a press briefing where she explains to people what are the current numbers? What's the positivity? What are the current concerns? Where are there clusters? Why are we doing things and not doing other things?
And then takes questions from a very grilling press over all kinds of issues to kind of justify why for accountability and for democracy and transparency, why different measures are being taken and which of those measures are scientific and which are political decisions. So I think compliance in Scotland has been very good because of that.
And that is a marker of places that have done better. I think of Angela Merkel in Germany, Jacinda Ardan in New Zealand. That's the kind of leadership you need right now which is kind of transparent, calm, considered, scientifically driven and trying to communicate very clearly why things are being done in the hope of progressing.
And we'll see how things go in the next few weeks, but currently Scotland and for example, Edinburgh seems to be doing okay without having a harsh lockdown with restrictions, of course, but with the hope restrictions could be lifted soon if the numbers continue to progress downwards and if compliance is good.
The more voluntary compliance you have, the less mandatory top down lockdowns you need, which is kind of this balance we need to get right between people just shifting their behavior in small ways and between penalizing people and putting in legislation to try to kind of create formal ways to change kind of lockdown measures.
So it's a tricky balance, but I think she's trying her best. And I've been pretty impressed working in different countries, actually seeing how she has managed this pandemic so far. Yeah. I I probably agree with all of that. One of the things that I mean, it's the the question, I suppose, that we're all wondering about all the time is how COVID ends, when it ends.
There's another thing we can talk about in a minute about what comes after it, and are there more Covids around the corner. But you wrote an article back in The Guardian in in April, I think, detailing four scenarios of how this could all end.
You wanna you wanna you don't need to go into the whole thing, but how how do you see it going? I mean and it seems like it's gonna go different ways in different places because of policies and and, different approaches. Yes. I can start first with part of the reason we haven't had great global cooperation with this virus is because different governments have taken different strategies.
And there's broadly three different strategies. There's, elimination. So get rid of the virus within your national borders, stop community transmission. The virus will exist other places on the planet, so it will become re imported at some stage, but you try to create safeguards and fences or bowls or whatever you wanna call it to protect against reinfection.
The second strategy is suppression, what you're seeing across Europe, which is just you keep trying to keep the numbers low. We've seen this largely through lockdown release cycles, but it can also be done through testing and tracing. And the third strategy we've seen is mitigation, which is you just build a lot of hospitals and you try to treat everyone who needs care.
You don't try to stop the spread of the virus. You try to stop the damage it inflicts in terms of deaths and disability. And so the part of the reason we haven't had good global cooperation is because every country is pursuing a different strategy.
If this had been like an Ebola event or SARS or MERS with much higher case fatality rate, we probably would have seen all countries running towards elimination and working together. But because the case fatality rate is around this one percent, because it largely affects vulnerable people, older people, It creates this kind of confusion among countries of what's optimal because the costs of elimination are then harder to justify.
So you get more pushed into suppression or into mitigation. Yeah, the piece basically says, how could this end? And it says, how can this kind of pandemic end? There's really four ways. One is that we country by country eliminate it till we work towards very low levels.
So kind of a global eradication project. And back in April, it's very unlikely, though I think some parts of the world might go there. We're already seeing COVID kind of through bubbles in Asia Pacific. The second is that we stay in lockdown release cycles till we get a vaccine.
And then that vaccine helps us escape those over time. The next is that we use testing and tracing in our public health infrastructure, again, to kind of wait for a vaccine or some kind of outcome. You can also use mass testing in there.
So we have cheap rapid tests. We're seeing Slovakia already doing that testing like millions of people within days just to kind of quickly isolate those who have it. So in a way it's like an elimination strategy but using your mass testing to kind of stay on top of it.
And the final one is that it becomes an endemic virus and it circulates and either it mutates to a milder version. So one of the other common cold coronaviruses or we develop a treatment that keeps people out of hospital and negates against the side effects.
So it becomes largely innocuous. So those are kind of the ways it can go beyond that. And there are a few ways out of this situation. And so those are kind of the decisions for government. What's your short term plan and what's your long term plan and the uncertainties about when will we have a vaccine, when will we have a treatment, how large is population immunity and what is the issue with long COVID and morbidity?
We understand mortality much better, but morbidity is still a lot to unpick in terms of the illness that this disease causes. So not for people who die, but people who still suffer from it for months and how do we cope with that? Yeah, I'm taking all of that into account.
If you had to put your money on an outcome for I know that's a hard question. I mean, is is is there a likelihood that we're gonna see global or or sorry, regional cooperation like Europe was gonna I mean, obviously, Britain's got its challenges with cooperating with Europe these days.
But is there gonna be, a European solution, Southeast Asian solution, North American solution? Went from a UK perspective. How do you think it's gonna plan out? Yeah, so it's really, I think right now up in the air. So my sense would be if we next four months are gonna be rough in the Northern hemisphere.
We're heading into winter. It's a period that anyways is tough for health services with seasonal illnesses in the NHS and even in the United States, health service hospitals being full. We are heading into a period of more restrictions because the virus is transmitting more so people will be more isolated.
And so it's quite a dangerous period. So I think in the next four months, if we are in this exact same position in four months in March, governments have an opportunity in Europe to come together and form a joint plan. I mean, might sound crazy, but the African Union has done it and Southeast Asian countries have done it and the Pacific countries have done it.
They've got together and said, how do we work collectively to drive this virus to low levels and then to cooperate in our strategies of lockdown testing or border measures or the guidance to drive the numbers really low. I think one of the problems we've seen in Europe is every country kind of doing its own thing.
But the problem is that if your neighbor next door or the person that you have a lot of traffic back and forth, whether it's air traffic, train traffic, bus traffic, car traffic is doing something completely different. It's gonna hamper your efforts. African countries knew this well because they've been trying to eliminate malaria.
They've been working to get on top of Lassa fever. So they're acutely aware that what your neighbor is doing in the region is gonna affect you. It's no point getting rid of malaria in your patch if the country next door hasn't and there's some artificial border on a map, the mosquitoes are gonna fly across that border.
So they know this intuitively because they've dealt with this for years. And I just think Europe might get there in the spring if we have a really bad winter. Ideally we have a vaccine that'll help, but a vaccine only helps you with your strategy.
So vaccine will either help you with your mitigation, meaning it'll help you reduce your deaths, or it's gonna help you with your suppression through breaking chains of transmission, or it's gonna help you with elimination, which is just trying to drive the virus out of human populations.
So a vaccine helps, but it's part of a strategy of what are you trying to do with this virus. And we don't have clarity on that yet for many governments. You you tweeted something, I think, last week about having a beach party that having next summer.
And, yeah, I have that that that tweet captured my imagination. Like, yeah, I'll go I'll go to any party anywhere anywhere in the world anytime as soon as as soon as that's a good thing to do. I mean, are we are we gonna be having beach parties next summer?
Is that is next summer gonna be are we gonna be back to things like holidays? So it depends which beach you're talking about. We're talking about a Pacific Island beach. I don't know if Australia and New Zealand are gonna let us in for a long time.
No, I mean, I guess two things behind that. One, I guess the tweet was to say, there is hope ahead of us and we will get past this and we will have social events and joy, especially in settings we're all together in the future.
And yeah, it's a choice for us. I mean, Scotland, for example, a few months back had practically eliminated the virus. If you look at the numbers in the month of July, we had very little virus circulating. If we could have sealed off fully and just on mass testing, we would be like New Zealand.
I mean, numbers were as good as New Zealand or South Korea at that point. And so it's really choice. I mean, it's a choice of, do you want your daily life back? So your rugby matches, your beach parties with the people on your patch of land, whether that's New Zealand or Australia or South Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan or Britain.
Music back kind of full domestic recovery, but traveling abroad is very difficult, involves quarantine, testing, different checks. Or do you wanna keep your borders open, have your foreign travel go back and forth, but you live under daily restrictions for quite a long time.
And that's really in my mind, what has become the choice for countries across the world, which is the border measures I think have been underplayed because there's no point having the harshest lockdown and clearing the virus. If you have your borders open and it's reseated, then you're back to where we were in February when the virus came out of Wuhan and spread across the world.
All it takes is a few chains of infection to spread and lead to hundreds and thousands of cases. So that's really the trade off people have to make. So I keep hope. I think by March or April, I will hopefully have a vaccine.
We'll definitely have mass testing. Countries will get their act together if we have a bad winter, so European countries will come together. And I think we'll be in a fundamentally different position. So I'm very hopeful for next summer, but I'm pretty pessimistic for this winter.
Yeah. That that's that seems to be the the message I've I've been getting as well on from people I follow on social. Yeah. I mean, I guess we could sort of live with that. Right? But we we have no choice. But if we but it is that silver lining. Right?
It is that, like, you know, this is not going to go on for, for, you know, interminably kind of, I think a lot of people have really felt, especially going into, well, know, you grew up in my area, now you're living in Scotland, you know, about what the Scottish winter can be like, it's, it can be a tough time.
But things are changing things. There is there is, you know, solutions are on the way, and and it seems like politics is maybe gonna be another thing that's gonna shift if we have that bad winter you talked about. How about society? How we seem to have this spectrum where on the one hand, people are, like, terrified to leave their home or touch anybody.
And on the other hand, people think it's all a hoax, they're sort of aggressively socializing. And, you know, the although, I have to say in Edinburgh, my daily life, I've seen a lot more empathy with with strangers, and everybody seems to be kinda on the same team as it were.
You know, can this adversity bring us all together? And is I mean, it seems like collaboration is gonna be a necessary part of life for a little while, right? Definitely. I mean, I think that's one of the really positive things is the re you know, the rethinking of what is society, what is happiness and what is value.
It is a hard winner, it's hard for everyone. And what I guess I tried to share is we need to focus on all the things we can do safely. So get outside. I mean, even in Scotland, I mean, the sun is shining today, other days it's raining, you get a coat on and you just go.
Getting outside is always good for mental health. Seeing others who are all in the same boat, because if you're in a park and it's raining down and there are other people there, at least you're together, there's community. So I think it's just kind of have to relook at how our lives are.
And there was a period of grief of like, obviously it's not gonna be the same as it was before, but we have to remake the world and how we wanna have it and find joy and happiness and all that we can do. And also I think look out for those who are struggling right now.
There are a lot of people who are lonely, who are financially insecure, who feel anxious. And I think there are more people than we think in those categories. And so it's how do we look out for each other and realize that we're not fighting each other, we're fighting a virus and we don't need to lock ourselves in our homes.
We also don't need to go out and pack ourselves into clubs and discos. There's a middle way, which is you can see people but try to do it outside. If the numbers prevalence is really low, then hopefully we can start seeing people inside as well over the holidays.
Avoid indoor crowded spaces. So if you go to a coffee shop and it's jam full, I mean, to find a different one or get coffee for takeaway. Non essential shops seem pretty okay with face coverings. Just put a piece of cloth over your face and then you can go into shops and get what you need and go on out.
So I think we kind of just have to adapt to this and kind of focus on all the things we can do and all the freedoms we still enjoy rather than kind of lamenting of all that's been lost because we just have to move forward.
I mean, it is what it is in a way, and we just have to be able to kind of live with it and move forward as best we can. Yep. Totally totally agree with that. It seems like it's a long time since the western world has had to deal with anything this sort of traumatic, you know, maybe all the way back to World War two in Europe.
And on the back of World War two, we had the Marshall Plan, we had Bretton Woods then where within one year, I think in nine nine between forty five and forty six, the UN, NATO, the World Bank, the IMF, and the World Health Organization were all created within a single year as a as a sort of response.
Like, let's let's try and avoid doing this again. Are we gonna are we gonna see that level? I mean, we're we're the economic impact is is enormous. The death toll is, I guess, on a global level, relatively low, but it's still a lot of people who've who've died and with the morbidity that you mentioned is still an unknown factor.
How much is is the world gonna work better together after this? I mean, the hope is that you'll have two shifts. One is within countries, people really paying attention to their leadership because the biggest determinant of how your life looks right now is the government in power and where you're living in this world.
So it really gets back to why we have governments and why we elect certain leaders and the characteristics of leadership we need and the characteristics of leaders in government that we need right now to steer us through a crisis, which is about integrity, transparency, hard work, competence.
And it's very easy for leaders to look at this virus and say, nothing we can do, too bad. That for me is the lazy way, it's giving up. It's really hard for leaders to say, actually we're gonna find a way through this. We're going to everyday fight and plow through this storm that's coming to protect our people and to protect the people that they represent.
So I think one thing is gonna be, I wonder how much this is gonna shift into politics. And the second I think is relooking essential workers, like what is, who are the backbone of our society is cleaners and doctors and teachers and delivery drivers and security guards and people who work in shops and in supermarkets.
And so I think also it might make us relook at actually what are the things we absolutely fundamentally need in society and how do we reward those jobs which kept working and kept running through the lockdown? And how do we value those more and make sure that we're really giving not just clapping to health workers, but actually proper compensation and value to those kinds of roles as well.
Yeah, completely agree. And it seems like that is something that seems to be on the agenda people are thinking about. And even in countries where, in Europe, I suppose most European countries have a pretty developed health system and public health system. The US has a different scenario, but I I think there's a lot of people wondering how it needs to look.
It sounds like you've got a pretty optimistic outlook on how, you know, where we end up and and the changes that we see. I mean, something that we've noticed, you know, you mentioned about being outdoors all the time. I I've spent every weekend outside.
I've got two young kids, and so it's you kinda have to be outside with two young kids. But every every all the Nordic countries have this saying that there's no such thing as bad weather, just the wrong clothes. But Scotland doesn't seem to have that saying.
It feels like we're gonna have to adopt that kind of thing. So do you think do you think that, we it's gonna just this shift in how we live? Travel, for example, how how do you see that panning out? Are we gonna are we gonna go back to traveling the way we were?
We're not, you know, something we'd spoke about, previously, you know, doing your video calls with colleagues in Japan or North America versus getting on a plane. How how much is that gonna shift? I think, you know, business travel and work travel is never gonna recover to the levels it were was before, because we always wondered if certain kinds of technologies could work for large meetings, for decisions, for discussions.
And the technologies have had to stand up because we haven't had the option of in person meetings across the world currently, given how difficult it is to fly and all the associated regulations. So I think we will see a move towards largely virtual and rethinking of when do we actually need to travel.
I think for the next few years, we will see largely people staying local, domestic tourism, staying within their areas. But I would imagine, I mean, within people's lifetimes, the next five, ten years, we will return to kind of traveling across the world. I mean, humans have.
It's just the next few years while we get through this pandemic, which as a whole, the whole pandemic is gonna last for several years, even with the vaccine and with testing. Different countries can find faster ways through it. Getting back to kind of our early conversation about next summer, European countries could find a better way through by next summer.
Different parts of East Asian countries already have, so have Pacific countries. But I think travel is gonna be different in terms of do we actually need to move? And one thing I have enjoyed is being able to be part of conversations from New York City to Tokyo, to Sydney.
These are all the places I've been in the last week. And it's been really nice to learn so much from different places without the associated cost of having to travel all the way there for the climate, for exhaustion as well. And so I think there is new ways of working and we have to, again, just find the silver lining and say, does this allow us to do now that we couldn't do before?
Debbie, I think that optimistic note is a is a good one to wrap up on. I'm I'm very much looking forward to the beach parties next summer on on Sky, on Portobello, wherever they may be around Scotland. Thanks so much for joining us.
And this has been a really informative chat, which I'm sure our audience is gonna get tons from. So thanks thanks for being here, and we'll we'll see you in person perhaps at another Turing Fest. That would be lovely. Thanks for having me. And definitely we'll we'll plan on that party next summer and can put the Turing Fest around it too.
Excellent. Good. Good thinking. Thanks, Debbie. Okay. So superb conversation there. I thought with Debbie, really one of the one of the most interesting and helpful people around right now. And like I said earlier, recommended on Twitter. Lots of lots of lots of great information, but also positive vibes, which we all kind of need right now.
So that's, that's pretty much it for the week. Next week, we have a whole host of new content to look forward to. We've got Paul Adams from Intercom, Val Geisler from Fix My Churn and Chuck Warner from Ada Ventures. The three of them will be doing keynotes on Tuesday.
We'll have our usual roundtables. We'll announce those at the start of the week. But we also have a hotly anticipated interview with Scotland's de facto techs are Mark Logan. So always good to catch up with Mark. And thanks as ever to all of our partners, but particularly to Mailchimp to Amazon Deliveroo and our local heroes current health.
And that's it for the week. Enjoy the weekend. See you next week.
