The epidemiology of spam

As someone who’s had the same email address for nearly 40 years, I get a lot of spam. (Of course, almost all of it is automatically filtered away.)

It’s been noticeable that spam was way down from January this year; and became vanishingly rare once India was put on lockdown last week.

But this week it’s come roaring back as China once again opens for business. I guess we know where most of it comes from (and maybe spam has a role to play as a covid-19 detector — perhaps we can find out how many infections there are really in Iran, for example).