June 2021

Speaker: Heriberto Cabeza, Professor at the Research Institute of Applied Earth Science at the University of Miskolc in Hungary. He retired as Senior Science Advisor, Land and Material Management Division, The COVID-19 Pandemic caused by the SARS-CoV-2 is, perhaps, the most impactful historical event of the second decade of the 21st Century CE. Across the World, there are more than 160 million confirmed infections and more than 3 million deaths attributed to the disease2. The pandemic has further had widespread environmental, economic, and social impacts. Pandemics have occurred throughout history, and here we review the highlights of three past events from antiquity, the middle ages, and modern times. There are aggregate parameter models also known as mean-field models that are widely used to understand the course of epidemics like COVID-19, and here we review the Susceptible-Infected-Recovered Model (SIR) and some of its modifications. As one can surmise, there is by now a good amount of time series data available characterizing the course of the COVID-19 pandemic for the World as a whole and nearly every country on Earth. We will discuss and contrast the course of the pandemic for: The World, the USA, Italy, India, and Japan. These four countries are representative of different geographical and cultural regions. A new approach which the authors have pioneered is the application of Fisher information to develop further insight into the dynamics of the pandemic. Preliminary results indicate that there are periods of time when study of the time series data can yield insights, but there are also periods where little information can be gathered. There also seem to be some universality to the dynamics which can be exploited in any effort to optimally manage the course of the COVID-19 pandemic. It is known that the pandemic has had environmental, economic, and social implications, and we will discuss some of these implications through the lens of global sustainability. Lastly, we recognize that forecasting the future course of an on-going event such as the COVID-19 pandemic is fraught with great uncertainty, but we will discuss likely near future outcomes and attempt to interpret their significance.Read more