While quants as a whole have far from excelled in their day jobs of beating the market of late, global cases now top 2.9 million and authorities are asking for all the constructive help they can get.

A consortium which includes the White House is calling for artificial intelligence experts to help unearth insights from the growing stockpile of Covid-19 research, according to Google’s platform for data scientists known as Kaggle. Meanwhile the U.K.’s Royal Society says there are 1,800 responders to its first call for disease-modeling assistance.

At hedge fund Atlas Ridge Capital, founder Christos Koutsoyannis is helping to launch the non-profit Covid Network, which uses advanced statistical techniques to match hospital demand with suppliers of personal protective equipment, or PPE.

He’s calling on the financial industry to share data such as cell-phone usage or satellite imagery that might help estimate the effectiveness of social distancing. “Quants might not have epidemiological experience, but the mathematical challenges are similar,” he said.

Plenty of his peers agree.

Rotella Capital Management, a 25-year-old systematic hedge fund, has developed models which parse publicly available data on virus fatalities. It’s been in contact with government agencies about the methodology, according to global head of strategic business development Dean Crowder.

“All quant funds have knowledgeable data scientists who can get involved in providing our respective government agencies and the medical professionals actionable insights to control the spread,” he said.

Data Crisis
Projections for the virus’s trajectory are critical in deciding when to re-open the economy, how effective intervention has been and how best to allocate resources. Finance quants are trying to help on all three counts.

Like Marcos Lopez de Prado, who has built machine-learning algos for some of the biggest money managers including Guggenheim Partners and AQR Capital Management LLC. He’s teamed up with an academic to propose a method to simulate more targeted lockdowns by breaking the population into different groups.

It’s an effort that’s all the more needed given the “data crisis” slowing down the pandemic response, according to Lopez de Prado and his co-author, Alex Lipton, a professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.