Manifesto for a post-pandemic modeling

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We were surprised by a pandemic that we were unable to predict, although we had a feeling and anxiety that something was coming ^[1]. Even though the pandemic has been going on for over half a year, we do not see pandemic’s end. At most, we observe the country entering the quasi-steady state and/or then a slower or faster pandemic recurrence/rebound (“phoenix effect” ^[2], [3]). Counting from the time of the “Spanish” epidemic from over a hundred years ago, we have not made enough progress in providing procedures for practical operation (see ^[4] for the universal philosophical/humanistic considerations). We have failed — the predictive power of epidemic models is low. Nevertheless, it is challenging to find at least a mathematical reason for this failure defining some of its causes precisely. Econophysics and sociophysics communities took this challenge seriously (see, e.g., ^[5] and refs. therein).

M. Ausloos, D. Grech, T. Di Matteo, R. Kutner, C. Schickus, H. Stanley, Manifesto for a post-pandemic modeling, Physics A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications 559 (2020) 125086