Bar-Yam is not a virologist or epidemiologist, but he is a leading name in the scientific world. As a theoretical physicist, he studies complex systems at the renowned New England Complex Systems Institute in Cambridge, USA, studied the financial crisis of 2008 and predicted the Arab Spring. He has now been researching pandemics for fifteen years. This focuses on which factors are driving a pandemic and how we can combat it.
“When you think about the pandemic, its effect on people’s lives, its effect on society and healthcare, you quickly realize that you have to apply complex policies,” he told Forbes in May of the corona crisis. “Each community has different characteristics. For example, in large cities you have more density, in the countryside you have less contact between people, but there are more frequent meetings of church groups. These characteristics determine the transmission speed of the virus. ”
Nine recommendations
On the website endcoronavirus.org, which he launched early this year along with a warning to governments, he posted nine recommendations in April to tackle the virus. For example, according to Bar-Yam, it is important to get everyone (ie all governments, communities, companies and individuals) on board. He went on to advocate the total isolation of the people with mild symptoms, masks in shared spaces, travel restrictions, securing essential services, massive testing, health guidelines to keep people healthy, and strong health care support.
In May, when we also announced new relaxations, Bar-Yam pleaded with the Dutch magazine De Groene Amsterdammer for a strict five-week lockdown to reduce the spread to virtually zero. “After that, life can return to normal, where proactive source and contact research can immediately suppress new, small outbreaks, ”says Bar-Yam.
In the meantime, we are in the middle of a second corona wave and the number of infections continues to rise everywhere. Bar-Yam therefore supports the new lockdowns in Ireland and Wales and recently argued for a real lockdown in a series of tweets. He also praised the strict approach – he calls it the ‘win strategy’ – of New Zealand, Vietnam, Taiwan, Australia and China.
In the tweets, the physicist points out again that “zero cases is the only way you can open everything up again without exponentially increasing cases”. “When the number of infections is zero, contact tracing has to stop transmission in a few cases. With a soft lockdown, the R-value (the number that indicates how many people one infected person ignites, ed.) Remains at 1 and you constantly get new cases. “
“If we have a lot of new cases, we can use a short strong lockdown to get to zero infections and we don’t have to perform soft lockdowns,” says the physicist. That is exactly what Van Ranst is advocating today. Furthermore, Bar-Yam recommends safely opening regions with no new cases (green zones) with restrictions on non-essential travel.
Is there a way to get to where we want without a lockdown?
Summary of Winning Strategy:
1. We want to open up fully, we don’t want to be in a lockdown.
2. Zero cases is the only way you can open up (no lockdown) without exponentially increasing cases.
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— Yaneer Bar-Yam (@yaneerbaryam) October 22, 2020
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