Intensive Collaborative Work on COVID-19 Modeling
This is a story of a COVID-19 modeling collaboration between two scientists who live at a considerable distance and who have been collaborating since 2017. They are developing several novel ideas to understand the spread of the epidemic. They work closely
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1 Introduction This is a story of a COVID-19 modeling collaboration between two scientists who live at a considerable distance and who have been collaborating since 2017. They are developing several novel ideas to understand the spread of the epidemic. They work closely at developing, planning, and policy-making decisions. The broader subject of mathematics and the subject of quantification are centuries old and these have been of great value not only for theoretical developments but appreciated for their positive roles in society. This includes understanding planetary motions as well as other useful ideas in ecology and environmental studies. However, mathematical ideas have been also in use for understanding the propagation of the number of people infected and the spread of epidemics since the 18th-century cholera epidemic in Europe, the 20th-century plague epidemic in England and India, the Spanish flu epidemic in the U.S. and other countries, and for several infectious diseases like HIV/AIDS, avian influenza, etc. Modeling the novel coronavirus (COVID-19 or SARC-nCov2) since it has been reported from mid-December 2019 in China has very particular characteristics. Several modeling experts across the world and other people working on quantification of epidemics are studying the matter from several different points of view. The ensuing results could range from
A. S. R. Srinivasa Rao (*) Professor, Medical College of Georgia, Augusta, GA, USA Department of Mathematics, Augusta University, Augusta, GA, USA e-mail: [email protected] S. G. Krantz (*) Professor of Mathematics, Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, MO, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 A. Wonders (ed.) Math in the Time of Corona, Mathematics Online First Collections, https://doi.org/10.1007/16618_2020_3
A. S. R. Srinivasa Rao and S. G. Krantz
(i) (ii) (iii) (iv) (v)
the uncertainty of the virus genomics, and its etiological properties, the uncertainty of what will be best treatment options if infected, how to contain the virus within an infected area, level of infectivity, list of all clinical signs and symptoms,
and so forth. Even in the initial days (late December of 2019, early January of 2020) it was not clear whether the virus would be spreading to other countries outside China. There were even suppositions that, if the virus reached the U.S., then it could be easily contained. The authors began by asking the following question: how do we construct wavelets (a kind of improved version of the Laplace transform from harmonic analysis) based on an epidemic from only partial information on that epidemic? The goal was to be able to construct a complete picture of an epidemic from partial information. We developed rigorous mathematical methods while addressing these questions and published our first paper in the Journal of Theoretical Biology [1]. We accelerated our preparation of this article from January–February, 2020 as we started to realize the importance of the me
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