By Gérard Weisbuch

(A contribution to the: JASSS-Covid19-Thread)

I totally share the view on the importance of DATA. What we need is data driven models and the reference to weather forecasting and data assimilation is very appropriate. This probably implies the establishment of a center for epidemics forecasting similar to Reading in the UK or Météo-France in Toulouse. The persistence of such an institution in “normal times” would be hard to warrant, but its operation could be organised as the military reserve.

Let me stress three points.

1. Models are needed not only by National Policy makers but by a wide range of decision makers such as hospitals and even households. These meso-scales units face hard problems of supplies: hospitals have to manage the supplies of material, consumables, personnel to face hard to predict demand from patients. The same holds true for households: e.g. how to program errands in view of the dynamics of the epidemics? All the supply chain issues also exist for firms, including the chain of deliveries of consumables to hospitals. Hence the importance of available data provided by a center for epidemics forecasting.
2. The JASSS call (Flaminio et al. 2020) stresses the importance DATA, but does not provide many clues about how to get them. One can hope that some institutions would provide them, but my limited experience is that you have to dig for them. Do It Yourself is a leitmotiv of the Big Data industry. I am thinking of processing patient records to build models of the disease, or private diaries and tweets to model individual behaviour. One then needs collaboration from the NLP (Natural Language Processing) community.
3. The public and even the media have a very low understanding of dynamical systems and of exponential growth. We know since D. Kahneman book “Thinking, Fast and Slow” (2011) that we have a hard time reasoning on probabilities for instance, but this also applies to dynamics and exponential. We face situations that mandate different actions at different stage of the epidemics such as doing errands or moving to the country-side for town dwellers. The issue is even more difficult for firms, who have to manage employment. Simple models and experimental cognitive science results should be brought to journalists and the general public concerning these issues, in the style of Kahneman if possible.

References

Squazzoni, Flaminio, Polhill, J. Gareth, Edmonds, Bruce, Ahrweiler, Petra, Antosz, Patrycja, Scholz, Geeske, Chappin, Émile, Borit, Melania, Verhagen, Harko, Giardini, Francesca and Gilbert, Nigel (2020) Computational Models That Matter During a Global Pandemic Outbreak: A Call to Action. Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation, 23(2):10. <http://jasss.soc.surrey.ac.uk/23/2/10.html>. doi: 10.18564/jasss.4298

Weisbuch, G. (2020) Go for DATA. Review of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation, 7th April 2020. https://rofasss.org/2020/04/07/go-for-data/

© The authors under the Creative Commons’ Attribution-NoDerivs (CC BY-ND) Licence (v4.0)