So many words

StatGroup-19 was born on March 3, with Fabio's call to arms.

We could not stand still in the face of the starting epidemic, miraculous models that claimed to save Italy from Covid-19 (it seemed like a TV sale: "and with the model I also give you two pots and three pans!") and people's real need to understand what's going on.

On our side we have that we made our work  out of the  passion of a lifetime.

Navigate the stream of data, sometimes not clean data,

that are made public every day has been our job for years. Our motto is "get your hands dirty instead of watching".

Our common work is a continuous flow of thoughts, sometimes disconnected, often at 6 in the morning or at 2 in the morning (insomnia is one of the common denominators that keep us together). Everything takes place in a chaotic Facebook chat, tucked into our already chaotic daily life made up of the usual workload, including teaching and research. We asked ourselves then: what did  we say these days?

Below you can see a wordcloud of the most frequently used words in these forty days.

Yesterday there were 26116 messages and 138245 words, with which we understood a little

more of the covid-19 pandemic, we gave ourselves some answers, we shared our code with colleagues from ours and from other countries, and above all, we hope to have helped someone to rationalize and to be less afraid. Close to typical words of our discipline (data, model, poisson, exponential ..) emerges the urgency, the need to quickly understand, launch hypotheses, conjectures, and doubts and continually verify them on the data (credo, forse, sembra, capire, fare...- I think, perhaps, it seems, understand, do ...), the words today (oggi), do (fare), done (fatto9, so frequent indicate concreteness and work in real-time.

A childhood friend of one of us, a few weeks ago, wrote: "I don't understand what those red dots are that you put in the graphs, but they give me some hope. " This made worth having written all those words in chat.

Yes, people different from us, the ones who fight with numbers since the first grade, are the reason that pushes us even today to do something, in our small way: the sister disheartened for having received WhatsApp messages that foresee the apocalypse; the physician friend who sees new sick people every day and asks you "when will it end?"; the ex-student or the old companion of a thousand adventures who will soon see the family grow and cross their fingers so that everything goes well; the mother of someone who no longer turns on the television because everyone says a different thing; who is locked in the house with us; distant friends who keep us company with a message to know how it goes.

We asked ourselves many questions and several others will be asked soon (among which: what is the best combination of interventions to replace the lockdown? what are the signs that we have to start with a new lockdown?); and continue the data hunt more disaggregated and cleaner, to be able to answer even more important questions. We are also doing and planning other things both individually and in groups, including collaborations with clinicians for the study of risk factors, prediction

of prognosis, the optimization of therapy.

Our goals always remain the same: to make ourselves useful with the things we do best.

However, we have a special goal: we already imagine ourselves on the terrace of Gianfranco in Palermo eating arancine, bread and panelle, sfincione and many other healthy things, with a glass of prosecco in hand.

It will take a while  for this to become real, but it is up to each of us to go back to doing what made us feel free.

 Happy Easter to everyone.