But why can't we just draw pairs out of a hat if it's so hard?

Well, we could do, but the danger with that is you might end up with fixtures happening that have already happened.

So for example, Scotland play Brazil in the final game.

It could be the case that you draw them out of the hat, and then Scotland play Brazil three days later in the, in the last thirty-two, and th- that wouldn't seem very interesting.

So we want to mix things up as much as possible.

So the way that this draw is designed is that games that have happened once can't happen again until at least they get to the quarterfinal stage.

So it's meant to keep it more interesting.

But since we don't know which team is going to rank highest on the basis of goal difference and all of the things that they use, since we don't know which of the third-place teams are going to rank highest, you have to have a lot of different combinations in order to separate them out from other teams they might be playing.

So, is there a mathematical reason why some numbers of teams make things more complicated for a tournament and others do not?

Well, on a very basic level, it comes down to whether things are a power of two or not.

Because once you get into the knockout stages, if you're going to end up with two teams in the final, you need to have four teams in the semifinal, eight teams in the quarterfinals and so on.

Yes.

And so the challenge with that is if you start off with a number of teams, that's a nice power of two.

The last time we had a World Cup, there were 32 teams.

It's all worked very nicely.

But the

Oliver, wh- why isn't there a vaccine?

So one of the challenges with an outbreak like this is they happen unexpectedly for relatively small number of patients, and then they stop.

And in that period of time, to develop a vaccine you need to do a whole clinical trial.

So you need to have the, uh, the clinical trial plans in place.

You need to have the stocks in place.

You need to have government permission to do a trial.

Um, you can test certain things in the lab, but the reality is to do a clinical trial, you need to do it on real patients who have the disease.

I mean, c-could you just de-develop that a little bit, I mean, in terms of the impact of the US leaving WHO and the cuts, um, from USAID and, uh, and, and the British government as well? I mean, w-what is the actual impact on the ground, and how does it affect an outbreak of Ebola, um, specifically?

Um, are there any similarities between what was happening then and what you see developing now?

Unfortunately, there are quite a few similarities, more so than with other recent Ebola outbreaks.

Partly, the outbreak seems to have a, a big head start of the response.

Uh, as we've heard, it's been since late April that cases have been circulating, and it could even be longer than that.

And the, uh, the, the virus has not only, um, affected a, a large number of people, but the, it's, you know, people have moved to different cities.

So one of the similarities is that the outbreak is already quite far along its way, and the response is only kicking off.

Other similarities is that it's between three different countries, uh, where it started, next to South Sudan, next to Uganda in the DRC, in areas with conflict, with migration, informal settlements, with weak health systems and, and quite high levels of mistrust in government in some cases.

But when you're talking about the immediate immediacy of this, because there, there's no cure, there's no vaccine for this particular strain, as you mentioned, so how do medical teams try and manage it?