What is the connection between Prof. Ran Balicer, World of Warcraft and the coronoa virus?
The Corrupted Blood incident was a virtual outbreak that occurred in the massively multiplayer online role-playing game World of Warcraft (WoW). The incident was caused by a debuff (a negative status effect) that was transmitted between player characters in close proximity, which was intended to only occur in a specific boss battle at the end of a raid. However, a programming oversight led to the debuff spreading throughout the entire game, creating a virtual pandemic that affected thousands of players. The incident has been studied by researchers as a model for how diseases spread in virtual environments.
At the time of this virtual outbreak Prof. Ran Balicer had a national roll in controling apedemics, and he was writing the contingency plans for viruses such as sars & avian flue. He noticed there was a massive correlation between the outbreak in the virtual world to outbreaks in the real world. The ability to move easily around, the role of animals in spreading diseases, this are just two examples of main factors that are similar both in the real and the virtual world. Balicer figured out that we can learn from this virtual outbreak, and that World of Warcraft could serve as a platform for studying the dissemination of infectious diseases, and as a testing ground for novel interventions to control emerging communicable diseases.
In 2007 Prof. Balicer published an article in the “Epidemiology” journal, that describes the similarity between the outbreak of the corrupted blood epidemic and the spread of diseases such as Sars or bird flu. Balicer claimed in the article that role-playing games can be used as a successful platform for modeling drug distribution. It is amazing to see that a few years after his unique distniction, the corona virus came to our lives and we saw familiar phenomena from the World of Warcraft Pandemic.
In the video below Prof. Balicer explains his discovery, how he sees healthcare in the future, and what are the promises and risks that doctors and people should think about.
Prof. Ran Balicer is a public health physician and researcher, serves as Chief Innovation Officer and Founding Director of the Clalit Research Institute at Clalit – Israel’s largest healthcare organization. When the corona pandemic got to israel he was the head cabinet of national experts to deal and manage the crisis, advising the goverment and the magen for israel system.