At the time of the pandemic, baring a few, most research institutes have put their hands up. When the society needs science and research the most, much of scientific workforce have been told to turn their back!
So the question emerges, what Scientists can do at a the time of pandemic to help the society. It’s never late to start the work now but the following might be kept in mind for the next epidemic. Given that India has faced outbreaks like Swine Flu, Nipah and CoViD in last 5 years, don’t be surprised if we have to deal with one more in the upcoming decade. So here the few ways in which scientific community (mainly researchers from Universities and institutions) may help !
Accurate and location dependent modelling of the outbreak
A big part of preventing an outbreak is to gauge it’s scale. There are basic models that can predict how fast or slow the pandemic would unfold, but it helps little to help the states to channelize the resources. For example, we all know that after two weeks the rise of CoViD 19 cases are exponential.
These predictions help the government to know how much resources like intensive care units/ventilators/masks/gloves they would need in the coming time. But it doesn’t help the government know where to direct the resources. What is best method of doing the lockdown? And how would a particular preventive measures affect the situation in coming weeks? Should we all buses for essential transport? Should cabs be allowed? Should local trains be allowed? What about domestic flights? What is the optimal strategy for testing for CoViD given limited resources? All these decisions are usually taken by the government and authorities on an ad-hoc qualitative basis without any proper quantitative estimation. The reason is that our society, demography and cityscape are much more complicated. They have a complicated graph/network structure and the details cannot be simply captured by thinking the population as a chain or a grid.
Since many of researchers should be of basic data analysis, statistics, programming ,they can be up and running to model the above scenarios and help the govt. to take the best decisions. Researchers would be aware that all the decisions that the govt has to take falls under the category of optimization problem. Those who have done computational complexity course would understand the resources scaling is usually not polynomial for most optimization problems. Thus universities with grid computing, powerful clusters, high performance computing server and even local powerful workstation need to join hands to build an efficient roadmap to fight the pandemicm
To begin with one can start with the static population density data which can be obtained from the decade old census. Assuming uniform growth rate of population over the decade and uniform local travel, we can model where the epidemic is most likely. The probability of community transmission are the weights of link between the nodes and then they depend on how much resources they have. For example, if the supply of gloves is there in a locality, the probability of transmission has a much lower weight compared to another locality with same population density but without the gloves or mask. How much of the community outbreak can be managed just by facilitating resources can be predicted from these models. However, for a better and dynamic strategy the dynamic population density can give much accurate predictions. Just like Google live maps can approximate vehicle density just by tracking how many phones are in a given area, it can also track the travel history and route of almost all the smart phones. That’s a closer approximation of how people are moving around. Partnering with companies like Google one can figure what are places where are the likely places that would need severe attention in future. Yes it’s the age of Big Data, but we all have our small parts to play.
Spreading Awareness and Fighting Fake News !!!
In the age of (mis)information, there are a lot of fake news around the virus. Being from any discipline, research scholars do have an eye to find the authentic scientific sources and think about the plausibility of various claims around the public. Fake news can be deadly. For instance consider the news that virus gets killed after we ring the bells to it for 5 mins. Many people fall prey to it thinking that the vibrations of ringing bell destroys the virus. Then they feel that the job is done and no need to take further precautions. This can be potentially deadly. Imagine a guy in rural India who was told by the authorities that he might have been in direct contact with CoViD+ve patient. The power of Fake News is such that he may ring the bell instead of visiting hospital.
Scientists have to take the initiative to bust the myths around the diseases. If we leave it to politicians/social media influencers the real message may get twisted and can back fire. So we Scientists can be the bridge between public and the health authorities is WHO. A researcher would need about a day or two to understand the basic mechanism of how the virus affect us.
And then each one of us, wherever we are, can translate the basic practices to the general public around us via social media or respective authorities in local languages.
There are already dedicated fact checkers in India and most of them now have dedicated pages on CoViD. The research students can easily cross check any suspicious information that they gather from peers/social group and then provide the correct information to the immideate neighborhood. Even if you inform 5 people a day that may save hundred lives down few months.
Along with it there are international organisations with FAQ pages of organisations like World Health Organization and Centre for Disease Control. Even following authentic handles of authorities like PIB India, Ministry of Health India etc would provide you and accurate information which you can pass on to peers, family and social group.
Wizardry Lost 