2019-2020 Novel Coronavirus outbreak: mathematics of epidemics, and what it can and cannot tell us (Nicolas Jewell)

At the most recent MSRI board of trustees meeting on Mar 7 (conducted online, naturally), Nicolas Jewell (a Professor of Biostatistics and Statistics at Berkeley, also affiliated with the Berkeley School of Public Health and the London School of Health and Tropical Disease), gave a presentation on the current coronavirus epidemic entitled “2019-2020 Novel Coronavirus outbreak: mathematics of epidemics, and what it can and cannot tell us”.  The presentation (updated with Mar 18 data), hosted by David Eisenbud (the director of MSRI), together with a question and answer session, can be found on Youtube at this link.  (I am on this board, but could not make it to this particular meeting; I caught up on the presentation later, and thought it would of interest to several readers of this blog.)  While there is some mathematics in the presentation, it is relatively non-technical.