Manifesto for a post-pandemic modeling

This Special Issue is the culmination of the pre-pandemic results, creating a starting point for the pandemic and after-pandemic study. With great curiosity, we cross the Rubikon into our global laboratory — an after-shock world.

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).