Covid 19: Has Science Run Out of Ideas?
by Suranya Aiyar September 2020 Contemporary epidemiologists portray their field as having emerged from a fog of mathematical illiteracy politely termed “descriptive” and “qualitative”, to its present “mathematical” and “quantitative” form ( 1, 2 ). Credit for this claimed shift to a mathematical approach is given to the British physician and amateur mathematician, Sir Ronald Ross, who won the Nobel Award in 1902 for demonstrating how malaria spreads through mosquitoes. Ross carried out his mosquito researches while serving in British India. But epidemiology has always been mathematical, studying the population-wide spread of disease in a numerical and statistical way. For a century before Ross, people like Daniel Bernoulli and William Farr had been applying mathematics to study the spread of infectious disease ( 18 ). At the time of Ross, all his contemporaries in epidemiology were expressing their ideas with statistical and mathematical analysis; there was Major Greenwood, a seni