COVID 19- WAS WHAT WE PREDICTED ACCURATE ENOUGH?
Health psychology was an understated field in science for a long time. From the beginning of the Ancient Ages when philosophers like Hippocrates and Plato believed the mind and the body to be totally different entities to the Middle Ages where supernatural explanations and inclination from the church determined medical practices, it was not until Renaissance and the inchoate ideas put out by Rene Descartes that health psychology began to be treated more seriously by medical practitioners. Research done by prominent psychologists, from Freud to Dunbar and Alex added more depth to health psychology and its relevance in preventing farther spread of illness, correct diagnoses and treatment plans with respect to the socio cultural, environmental and behavioral factors of patients. At this point of advancement in the health care sector and medicine, the concept of health psychology has proved substantially beneficial, especially since the onset of the COVID 19 pandemic.
So when the world faced the onset of a global pandemic, it was crucial for First World and Third World countries alike to be able to predict and accurately determine the spread of this virus in nations with different economical, environmental and behavioral factors. Researchers used methods from mathematical modeling to health psychology to predict the number of cases per day, aiming to make the precision razor sharp by displaying data as precise as the number of cases per day in each of the 29 states in India.
But the question is, were the predictions helpful? According to researchers, the dynamic of the transmission of the disease, the research samples from the population and so much as the mathematical model used to predict the spread of the disease widely vary from nation to nation. The Gaussian Model was used in France, the Netherlands, Germany, Spain, United Kingdom and the United States since the transmission of the virus is predictably fitting to the Gaussian hypothesis. Researchers concluded however that the same could not be applied to India and African countries since the cases reported there and the fatality was exponential. The Lotka Volterra dynamic model is used instead and the Kalman filtering technique is used for short term predictions.
Through extensive research and time taken by mathematicians and medical researchers all around the world while the predictions made in some cases came with dead on accuracy, it was still particularly tedious to make accurate long term descriptions. A global pandemic called for stringent action by the government of every nation, resulting in major changes in the policies and plans of the legislature, the lockdown and the vital changes in the Indian economy being testament to the fact. For a larger amount of days the error spotted was much more substantial. The reason behind the higher value of error bound could have been the discharge policies of hospitals in different states. Due to the uncertainty involved in government policies and their decision making process, the unpredictability of whether people follow social distancing or not and the availability of medical resources all factored into the preference of a short term model over a long one. The trends and analysis created by health psychologists about how different countries would cope with this virus over time affected the predictions much more, and also made the tedious process to eradicate this virus easier and more goal oriented since while no one saw the virus coming, at least we could predict how it would go now.