So, whats the answer?
What criteria should be used to determine the end of Covids pandemic phase?
These are deceptively simple questions and there are no easy answers.
I am acomputer scientistwhoinvestigatesthe development of ontologies.
Ontologies also underlieGoogles Knowledge Graphthats behind those knowledge panels on the right-hand side of a search result.
It’s free, every week, in your inbox.
Applying ontologies to the questions I posed at the start is useful.
Such a precise characterization of the X will also reveal when an entity is not an X.
If it doesnt, at least it will be possible to explain why things are not that straightforward.
This sort of precision complements health experts efforts, helping humans to be more precise and communicate more precisely.
It forces us to make implicit assumptions explicit and clarifies where disagreements may be.
Definitions and diagrams
Iconducted an ontological analysisof pandemic.
First, I needed to find definitions of a pandemic.
A pandemic, as a minimum, extends the region where the infections take place.
Next, I drew from existing foundational ontologies.
This contains generic categories like object, process, and quality.
I also used domain ontologies, which contain entities specific to a subject domain, like infectious diseases.
Among other resources, I consulted theInfectious Disease Ontologyand theDescriptive Ontology for Linguistic and Cognitive Engineering.
First, I aligned pandemic to a foundational ontology, using adecision diagramto simplify the process.
Yes (perdurant, i.e., something that unfolds in time, rather than be wholly present).
(2) Are you able to be present or participate in [a pandemic]?
Yes (event).
No (accomplishment).
The word accomplishment may seem strange here.
Characteristics
Next, I examined a pandemics characteristics described in the literature.
They collated eight characteristics of a pandemic.
But from my ontologists viewpoint, were getting somewhere with these properties.
From the computational side,automated reasoning with fuzzy featuresis possible.
COVID, at least early in 2020, easily ticked all eight boxes.
A suitably automated reasoner would have classified that situation as a pandemic.
But now, in early 2022?
Severity (point 8) has largely decreased and immunity (point 4) has risen.
Point 5 are there worse variants of concern to come is the million-dollar question.
More ontological analysis is needed.
Conversely, it implies that classifying the event as not a pandemic is just as imprecise.
