The ViralMath.org Mission

Welcome to ViralMath.org with this post describing our mission to help fight the deadly COVID-19 pandemic through citizen scientists making their contribution to analyze outbreak data.

We believe that the control of COVID-19 is one of the greatest scientific and organizational challenges of our time. Everywhere, there are persons of scientific training and merit who could make a contribution to this effort. However, we need to recognize not all of those people work in Universities or large and well resourced firms. There are talented people in firms and bodies of all sizes. Our mission is to help those people connect, share their insights, and ultimately make a contribution towards the global effort to tame this pandemic.

The purpose of this initiative is to help talented Data Scientists, Quantitative Analysts, Mathematicians, Physicists, Statisticians, Artificial Intelligence experts, and talented misfits, get up to speed in making their own contributions to the worldwide fight to limit the growth and human cost of the COVID-19 pandemic.

There will be many such sites spring up, and so we aim to run a blog roll to help promote such joint efforts.

This particular blog will mainly focus on the mathematical epidemiology side of analyzing outbreak data. Our focus lies between the world of academic scientific research and business and public policy. We cannot be all things to all people, but we do hope to provide a leg up for talented analysts who may otherwise be discouraged.

Let us be honest. The world of setting public policy will be dominated by those who make it their business to be close to the wheels of government. The world of risk assessment with direct financial consequences will likely be covered by investment banks competing with one another for their client attention. The world of big tech will likely be driven by attempts to garner more monetized attention on their digital properties.

It will be very hard for people with good ideas to be listened to in the midst of that public clamor for attention.

This initiative is called ViralMath.org for a reason…

Our mission is to talented individuals, who have no direct monetary benefit from the business and consulting side of the worldwide pandemic response, to feel empowered to make a positive contribution to the global fight.

We know there are very many of you sitting at home right now, with perhaps some idle skills, or a long ago period of degree study in mathematics, statistics, physics, epidemiology or computer science. You may well be thinking that this is the sort of challenge where we can do more than simply produce dashboards tracking the epidemic. We at ViralMath.org believe you.

Indeed, we think there is much more that can be done. One way you can help with that is to become a contributor writing articles on what responses around the world may be worth emulating.

This is a global crisis where people can well learn from each other, and also inspire each other with good ideas for helping fight COVID-19. We can see this happening already, with efforts to emulate the success of places like Taiwan in their proactive use of smartphone sourced contact data to help trace infections and warn of possible risk to individuals. There will be very many stories of this nature, and the world can benefit from more active sharing.

However, in addition to the data side of the problem, it is very important to consider how the ability to track progress of the virus, through different stages of the pandemic outbreak, in different locations, can help. We are seeing numerous examples of successful COVID-19 interventions, and it can be very helpful to public policy if there are more eyes looking at ways to measure and quantify the success of interventions.

One small story may help to illustrate this. When your author first got involved in studying the early progress of the outbreak in China, I had just been actively involved in financial research with a good friend on stochastic models for financial growth processes. We have been working together for six months already on improving the standard random walk models of finance.

Through direct contact with that subject, we both had a good current working understanding of Stochastic Differential Equations as applied to financial modelling. To our great surprise, one of the simpler, and better known, models of quantitative finance, the so-called Vasicek interest rate model, gave a near perfect fit to the Chinese epidemic outbreak data.

The same model also worked very well in South Korea.

This post is not the right place to go into detail on that modelling effort. We will later. However, perhaps this small example will serve to encourage people. While our model did fit the data it did not seem to be in standard use in epidemiology. That is surprising, but apparently true.

While the initial simple model, which worked for China, will not work in unmodified form for other locations with complex outbreaks, like Europe and the USA, it can still be useful as a simple tool for figuring out what stage of control a given outbreak is at.

These and other topics are what we hope to encourage active sharing of independent research. Those of you who have existing scientific publication records (like myself in Theoretical Physics) will doubtless want to put your findings into the formal literature for peer review.

ViralMath.org will help, so far as we can with that.

We are actively seeking sponsors, once there is a legitimate body of research, to help defray the page charges that are normally associated with academic publication. These can run to many thousands of dollars per article. When there is high quality independent research, we think that should have the opportunity for formal publication.

In the early stages of this effort, we will likely only distribute research in pre-print form. However, we would also like to create an effort where those who are seasoned scientific researchers (like your author) can mentor those who are early career students or post career knowledgeable persons with scientific backgrounds.

So that is our mission…

This first post is to say Hello World! and thank those who helped set up this website.

A big shout of thanks to the folks at Sydney based technology firm lbhpartners.com.au for their support.

Specifically, I would like to thank Michael Langley and Nam Huaong.

Expect more posts shortly covering an introduction to epidemiology data, sources and analytical methods.

Stay healthy and stay safe,

Dr Kingsley Jones, CFA

Theoretical Physicist and Investor

Founder, Jevons Global Pty Ltd