https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/09/200903105559.htm

Operation Outbreak came about after Todd Brown, then a middle school teacher in Florida, contacted Pardis Sabeti (@PardisSabeti), a computational biologist at the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT, after reading a profile of her in a magazine. He and his students were studying the ongoing Ebola outbreak in West Africa, and he was developing a simulation of how the virus spread using stickers.

As they continued to work together, Sabeti and her team, including Andrés Colubri (@codeanticode), at the time a computational scientist in her lab, began studying mumps outbreaks across Boston college campuses. The idea to create an educational app that "spread" viruses through Bluetooth was soon born. And as recently as December 2019, they were running simulations modeling the outbreak of a virus with a very similar modus operandi to SARS-CoV-2.