Formula 1: The GOAT

”Since when has that been there?” Rümeysa asked when she returned home from the office to a new stationery-grade printer set up in the kitchen next to the dining table, printing page after page of paper that accumulated on the tray.

”Four hours ago, a group of people delivered it and set it up before leaving. As for the printing, it started about ten minutes ago when he returned and left for the karting track,” Güldane, Fatih’s grandmother, said as she continued cutting the tomatoes.

Rümeysa stood there for a moment and looked at the printer. It was clear that it was not cheap, but for Fatih to go and make the purchase of it immediately meant either he was making impulsive purchases or he really needed one of this scale, and she leaned towards the latter. So she walked to the printer and looked at the printed papers that kept accumulating. Just as she was about to pick some of them up, her mother said, ”He said they are printed in a specific order and not to pick them up,” causing her to stop and just look at them without touching them.

From just taking a peek, she could see satellite image after satellite image being printed; some were highlighted, some were focused on. Some pages were full of numbers and tables, making it clear that this was not something being printed on a whim. Although she was curious, she decided to wait for Fatih to return from the karting track to ask him about it. After all, it had been an entire week since she had seen him crying, and that had affected her more than she had realized on that day.

Since that day, she had accelerated the campaign to increase the level of influence they had in the motorsports world, even doubling Elena’s budget to achieve that, while she was also in the middle of planning and approving adding additional shares in Liberty Media to increase their holding closer to that five percent again, with their percentage having been diluted by new shares being issued for additional acquisitions.

.......

”Mom, do you have time after dinner?” Fatih asked the moment he returned and saw her in the dining room going through some of her documents she had brought from work.

”Sure,” she said without raising her head as she continued reading.

Fatih, who was at the base of the stairs, just acknowledged that and rushed to his room as he needed to wash up and finish his preparations for the conversation after dinner.

...

”This is going to take some time, so bear with me, as I’m getting somewhere with this,” Fatih said as he picked up the stack of papers, which had already cooled after being left in the open air for hours, from the printer.

He got a nod from her, which he took as her telling him she was fully listening.

He placed a picture of a parking lot and said, ”March 18th, 2009, Mexico City. And this is April 8th, 2009. What do you think is the difference?” he asked as he placed another picture next to the first one that was clearly from the same location.

”Cars, they are overflowing in this second image,” she said as she pointed to the second picture.

”I know you are curious, but please let me go with the prepared presentation,” Fatih said when she saw that she was about to ask what this had to do with anything.

”This is May 28th, 2015, Seoul, South Korea,” he said as he placed another picture of a parking lot on the table, ”and this is June 5th, the same place, same time of day,” with the second picture he put on the table showing an overwhelming number of cars in the parking lot.

”These two were taken on July 15th of this year, and these were taken yesterday from two locations in Wuhan, China, at the same time of the day,” he said as he placed four more pictures, two of them of clearly half-utilized parking lots and two of them of the same parking lots but filled with more cars.

”The pictures in themselves have no meaning except when you take into account these of the same places,” he added as he placed eight pictures for each of the different parking lots while saying, ”These pictures are from each of the three years before the year the pictures I first showed you are from, and each of the four years after. What can you deduce from that?” he asked, enjoying how he was slowly taking her to the conclusion.

”In each of these sets, there is a year where the number of cars in the picture is almost double, if not more,” she said, going along with things.

”What if I told you these are hospital parking lots? What would you think is the reason?”

”Flu season?” she asked before immediately backpedaling. ”But that would be constant at that time of the year, which this is not.” Just as she was about to continue rambling, something about 2009 and 2015 reminded her of something, as she immediately said, ”Swine flu and MERS. Do you mean to tell me that this is about those dangerous diseases? But I don’t remember hearing about anything this year,” she said, questioning herself, because although the first two years correlated with that, the 2019 one didn’t match, to her knowledge.

”Yes, it is exactly as you said; it is one of those dangerous diseases. And it’s exactly because of the second point that I wanted to take this one step at a time,” he said before gathering all of the papers, leaving only the ones with parking lots full of cars. He then picked up a new stack and placed them orderly next to the pictures.

”The blue table is Google’s search volume on these specific days, but also a week before and a week after these pictures were taken. And these are the averages of the same searches in the same period for the three preceding years and the two subsequent years, minus the...” He was taking it step by step, introducing more and more data for each of those years.

If someone had gathered and gone through it as it happened, they would definitely have seen the signs of these diseases happening and spreading before they were notified to the WHO and the world.

All the pictures of the parking lots being full were pictures of hospitals being overwhelmed by patients, but before the WHO made any announcement about the H1N1 influenza in Brazil in 2009, or the MERS outbreak in South Korea, the signs were there, but everyone missed them because they were not looking for them at all.

Having shown her Google Trends data, for which he provided Baidu data for the Wuhan situation, which was more reliable for China, he gave her the precise car numbers counted by their machine-learning algorithm. It showed the difference from the first picture to the one he showed, with cars being more than twice the standard deviation of the same time in past years.

But this time he gave her the entire timeline of pictures from the start of the deviation all the way to the WHO announcement, and it showed the gap being more than ten weeks sometimes. The 2019 situation was worse, as it was something that had been building up since August of this year, but even now, at the end of November, it was not being talked about by anyone at all.

He followed it with the Pharmaceutical Purchase Index for all three different situations, and all showed the same trend, albeit with different time lengths, with the tables accounting for everything from possible population increase, peak outbreak, and more.

When he finished showing all of the additional data, he added, ”The two I showed you are all things that were mostly contained within a single city because the time from discovery to public acknowledgment and action was very short. But with the current one, it has been four months of it building up, and still, nothing is being announced, meaning...”

Before he could finish, his mother said, ”Someone is suppressing it.”

”Yes,” he nodded before continuing, ”And worse than that, this is Wuhan Tianhe International Airport. On a normal weekday in November, approximately fifty thousand passengers go through here, with services to over a hundred international destinations, meaning if it’s transmittable by air or touch, it is highly likely being spread already. And that is not the worst of it,” he said as he handed her the details about the international airport in Wuhan.

”There is more bad news?” she asked as she looked with worry at the airport report.

”In approximately seven weeks, the Chinese New Year travel period will begin, and that will mark the start of the largest annual human migration on the planet, as hundreds of millions of people will be moving across China and boarding international flights home to Southeast Asia, Europe, North America, and Australia.

If only a fraction of them have the disease still incubating in them, then the entire world will be at risk of being infected,” he said with worry, as he knew that this is what was going to happen but couldn’t just tell her that.

”Oh my god,” she said as she realized the possibility if it truly was a disease.

”The timing couldn’t be worse,” he said as he slid the rest of the thick stack of documents to her. ”I worked on this with people at Odin, and they are very confident about it and have made sure to thoroughly check it again and again. From what they found, the composite anomaly score for Wuhan right now is 6.1 standard deviations above baseline.

When we ran this same model retrospectively against Mexico City in 2009, the peak score before official WHO acknowledgment was 5.1. For South Korea in 2015, it was 4.7.

This means if it is true, then whatever is happening in Wuhan right now is bigger, at this stage, than either of those were at equivalent early-stage timing. And H1N1 infected sixty million people in the US alone, and MERS had a case fatality rate of approximately 35%. You can take a look at it in-depth and in more detail in the document, where everything is explained fully.”

She pulled the stack toward her and looked at the cover page for a long moment before she asked, ”How confident are you?”

”Confident enough that I waited two months before bringing it to you,” he said. ”I kept expecting it to come back down. It didn’t.”