Random walk

Being a researcher in a COVID world can seem easy, at least for some time. One somehow continues to get paid until end of contract. But meanwhile, the government has been spending a lot to support other professions. And of course, where did they get the magic money from? By creating debt. Even a joint European one. That in fine will take on the research budgets. So basically, as researchers, we don't get to know the real crisis simultaneously to society. We will get it with a 1-3 years delay.

Therefore one has to prepare the adaption to the next phases. While COVID in continuing spreading in every countries, one can notice that a wave phenomenon is taking place - it is not a simple isotropic transport with high damping leading to some usual diffusion, i.e., large dissipation and disappearance of the disease until next mutation comes in. This time, the virus propagates, comes back and does not dissipate. It just travels and comes back after a certain time.

Moreover, the period of the COVID waves seem to strongly depend on the country. Today, I got quite surprised by the statistics of number of new cases per day normalized to the number of tests (then expressed in percents of tested people). On this basis, Japan has already started to see its 3rd wave leaving, preparing for the 4th one. Interesting is the delay between 2 waves: 3.3 months.

This delay between peaks is country-dependent. It depends on the policy that countries are applied around the peaks, and in between. Since we have to continue and adapt to the economical life in between, one should start to think about making periodical activities, in phase with the waves.

When the COVID cases are high, we stay home and do home officing. During more easy times, we may travel.
 

Using the data from World Health Organization (see https://worldhealthorg.shinyapps.io/covid/ > Regional Overview > Heatmap > % positive).

In the Czech Republic, we are finishing our 2nd second wave. The period between two waves seems to be (43-10)=33 weeks. It makes 8 months. It's pretty large.

In Japan, peak weeks were on weeks number 15, 30 then 47. So we may deduce there is a period of 16 weeks between each peak: 4 months.

In France, worst weeks were number 14 and 48: 34 weeks between (i.e., 8.5 months).

Watching on the statistics will be important to plan the future life. By understanding the statistics sufficiently well, we become able to make sufficiently accurate predictions for preparing the somehow periodic future we will have to live with.

For example, out of these first measured periods, one can identify two periods where it would be possible to travel to Japan: January 1st week and August 1st week of 2021.