We are living through the most serious health emergency of the last century, which is beginning to generate a social emergency and an economic crisis whose tremendous severity we have only just begun to grasp. In less troubled times, we in mathematics tend to send society a message of its practical usefulness, and in these complicated circumstances we cannot fail to show that we were right, and we can do so in several ways.
The first and fundamental way is by helping epidemiologists, health officials and politicians to make the right decisions. Because of the very idiosyncrasies of the pandemic, the virus is days or even weeks ahead of us: it is impossible to know the real number of people who have been infected the day before yesterday, yesterday and today, who are those who are likely to need hospital admission or an ICU bed in a week or ten days’ time. Knowing the evolution of the actual number of infected and which are the hotspots of infection would allow a better decision on when and what kind of containment measures to be applied. Mathematics, and more specifically statistical estimation, can gain some of the advantage days of the virus, because it helps to obtain reasonable estimates for these key variables from the available data. This is where mathematics will be most useful, in collaboration with epidemiologists, doctors and politicians. Always bearing in mind that we are not developing a typical research project, but rather helping out in an emergency situation where it is considered essential to shorten response times. Covering this fundamental front is the objective of the Acción matemática contra el coronavirus, which CEMat very successfully launched in the first weeks of March.
But there are more things we can do through mathematics. One of them has to do with our presence in the media, and what we want to achieve with that presence. What could we do if our offers of collaboration are not heard, or not as much as we would like, by the political or health authorities? Or if the microdata or detailed data necessary to be able to make reliable statistical estimates are not made available to the mathematical community? Well, we could put pressure through the media to correct these dysfunctions, but for that we have to be present in the media.
Of course, we can also use the media to inform and even educate public opinion on very relevant aspects of the pandemic. We can also appeal to the reputation of reliability that mathematics has among the population to show that well-explained numbers are very clarifying, and can help us to understand the situation better and help us to act more efficiently. For example, it is important to understand why we have been and still are forced to remain housebound, and it helps to provide reliable estimates of the actual number of infected and what that means for epidemic control, while estimates of the number of lives saved by these containment measures will give us the strength to continue. It is mathematics that provides these statistical estimates, and if politicians do not talk about them, either because it is not easy to explain what a statistical estimate is or for some other reason, then it must be up to mathematics to provide the proper explanations. Something similar will happen when confinement begins to be lifted. Whether there will be a new outbreak, or how long it will take and how serious it will be, will depend not only on whether the government gets the measures right, but also on how responsibly citizens behave and what habits they adopt. It is not enough to prescribe rules of behaviour in the face of the epidemic; it is also necessary to explain and make people understand why it is important to follow them. And here again, mathematics can contribute a great deal: when used well, it conveys both forcefulness and clarity in the explanations. It would be desirable that policymakers could do this, and sometimes they do, and very well; in a previous post I gave Chancellor Merkel as an example, but of course she was a physicist and a doctor in quantum chemistry before becoming chancellor. But, either to reinforce explanations or to provide them when they are not given, we in mathematics and through the media cannot fail to make our knowledge available to the audience. It will certainly contribute to a better educated, better informed and more responsible society, capable of understanding and following safer rules of behaviour for all.
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