Mission Statement

The Coronavirus has a firm grip on nearly all countries around the world. To reduce its spread, many countries have imposed strong lockdowns. These lockdowns are severely damaging to society, and we need to think about smart, science-based exit strategies to weather the storm now.

The goal of Strategies versus Corona is to generate, model, and evaluate different exit strategies through a massive Open Science and Citizen Science based initiative. We will do this in four phases

Phase 1: Generating ideas. We invite everybody to submit ideas about how to lift the lockdown (“exit strategies”), as well as criteria to evaluate these on. Ideas can be in the form of scientific articles (such as de Vlas & Coffeng, 2020) or less structured thought pieces, but also existing ideas that you came across and think might be useful. You can submit your ideas here. An overview of all submitted ideas will be curated here.

Phase 2: Modeling. In this phase, we call on scientists from all walks of life to come together and propose and investigate potential exit strategies in detail. Participants will get access to a Slack channel for communication, with a dedicated space to exchange ideas and find collaborators. Our goal is to have interdisciplinary teams propose and assess the impact of different exit strategies on society in a holistic manner. Are you excited to join forces and help society find an exit? Then sign up here!

Phase 3: Evaluation. The proposed models and exit strategies will be evaluated by an interdisciplinary jury of, among others, epidemiologists, economists, psychologists, and computer scientists.

Phase 4: Optimization and Robustness. Candidate exit strategies will be optimized and evaluated with respect to their robustness. This way, we can verify that the generated models are not overly sensitive to uncertainty in the measurements.

Through this grass-roots initiative, we aim to crowdsource available expertise, both in terms of citizens’ creativity and in terms of scientists’ knowledge.