Transmission: SFI insights into COVID-19

Transmission is the Santa Fe Institute's real-time and ideas-based response to the COVID-19 outbreak. 

Many of our researchers are hard at work collaborating on the monitoring and modeling of the epidemic, the development of vaccines and tests, and seeking to project the socio-economic impact of the disease as well as plotting paths to recovery.

Beyond this important SFI applied science, Transmission allows our researchers to address issues that relate to the complexity of the pandemic. And we hope these will be of value and even of use to society at large. 

In Transmission, we are introducing ideas from complexity science to include: why systems collapse, the nature of an evolving virus and its ecology, how networks spread disease and economic instability, the mathematics of modeling outbreaks, the way decision-making modifies disease spread, and many other ideas that touch on the disease.

Transmission articles will all be brief and varied in their technical demands. But all of them will strive to get across a few key ideas or methods that our researchers feel are worth communicating.

I sincerely hope that some of these Transmissions from the world of complexity science provide you with valuable insights. 

Safety through reason,

David Krakauer
President and William H. Miller Professor of Complex Systems
Santa Fe Institute

 

PDFs of the posts in the Transmission series:

BATCH 1, released 30 March 2020

• Transmission T-000: David Krakauer on Citizen-Based Medicine
• Transmission T-001: David Kinney on Why Scientists Must Make Value Judgments in a Complex Crisis
• Transmission T-002: John Harte on Reducing Conflicting Advice on Allowable Group Size
• Transmission T-003: Luu Hoang Duc and Jürgen Jost on Making the Most of Bad Data
• Transmission T-004: Simon DeDeo on Thinking Out of Equilibrium

 

BATCH 2, released 6 April 2020

• Transmission T-005: Andrew Dobson on the Need for Disease Models which Capture Key Complexities of Transmission
• Transmission T-006: Miguel Fuentes on Using Social Media Data to Detect Signatures of Global Crises
• Transmission T-007: Danielle Allen, E. Glen Weyl, and Rajiv Sethi on How to Reduce COVID-19 Mortality While Easing Economic Decline
• Transmission T-008: Michael Hochberg on the Importance of Timing in Restrictive Confinement
• Transmission T-009: Melanie Mitchell on How the Analogies We Live by Shape our Thoughts

 

BATCH 3, released 13 April 2020

• Transmission T-010: Bill Miller on Investment Strategies in Times of Crisis
• Transmission T-011: Santiago Elena on a Complex Systems Perspective of Viruses
• Transmission T-012: Manfred Laubichler on How Every Crisis is an Opportunity
• Transmission T-013: Mirta Galesic & Henrik Olsson on Opportunities for Science Communicators
• Transmission T-014: Doug Erwin on Not Letting a Crisis Go to Waste

 

BATCH 4, released 20 April 2020

• Transmission T-015: Anthony Eagan on Federalism in the Time of Pandemic
• Transmission T-016: Carrie Cowan on the Future of Education
• Transmission T-017: Stephanie Forrest on Privacy Concerns That Arise with the Pandemic
• Transmission T-018: Sidney Redner on Quantitative Ways to Consider the Economic Impact of COVID-19
• Transmission T-019: David Wolpert on Statistical Tools for Making Pandemic Predictions

 

• Transmission T-020: John Krakauer and Michelle Carlson on COVID Spiraling Frailty Syndrome
• Transmission T-021: Stefani Crabtree on what History can Teach us about Resilience 
• Transmission T-022: Van Savage on the Informational Pitfalls of Selective Testing 
•  Transmission T-023: David Tuckett, Lenny Smith, Gerd Gigerenzer, and Jürgen Jost on Making Good Decisions under Uncertainty
• Transmission T-024: Cristopher Moore on the Heavy Tail of Outbreaks

 

BATCH 6, released 4 May 2020

• Transmission T-025: Chris Kempes and Geoffrey West on Understanding Cities to Respond to Pandemics
• Transmission T-026: Eric Maskin on Mechanism Design for the Market
• Transmission T-027: Pamela Yeh and Ian MacGregor-Fors on Studying Wildlife in Empty Cities
• Transmission T-028: Sidney Redner on Exponential Growth Processes
• Transmission T-029: David Wolpert on SARS-CoV-2 and Landauer's Bound