The purpose of this question is NOT to help with the ongoing real research.

Rather, I want to use the excitement of living in a pandemic to learn new stuff, mostly statistics and computer modelling. I noticed that I'm wasting a lot of energy reading clickbait articles and I want to redirect that energy towards something more productive in the long term. (Side-note: generally my self-improvement meta-strategy is redirecting emotional impulses with minimal willpower, rather than imposing self-discipline which in my experience depletes more willpower and is less enjoyable.)

I'm interested not only in health outcomes but also/mostly economic ones.

Resources I have identified so far:

• http://jvalue.co.uk/papers/J-value-assessment-of-combating-Covid-19-Thomas-23.3.2020.pdf (the draft from U of Bristol that recently made the news since it provides an estimate of a cutoff cost above which harm to the economy will cause more deaths than Covid-19). I'm also going to follow up on select bibliography, although without much excitement because the most promising citations seem to be to earlier papers by the same team.
• https://gabgoh.github.io/COVID/index.html - interactive visualisation of the commonly used epidemic model with tweakable parameters and a brief writeup explaining the model
• https://www.stlouisfed.org/~/media/files/pdfs/community-development/research-reports/pandemic_flu_report.pdf "Economic Effects of the 1918 Influenza Pandemic" This article was recommended to me but I haven't even skimmed through it yet.

For the sake of other readers who might also be interested, any related resources and advice will be very welcome.

My own background is in C/C++ programming with some Python experience and nearly all of statistics knowledge forgotten. I would prefer my study to focus more on maths, statistics, etc. since it should yield greater proportional gain in knowledge for time invested (since my starting point in computer-related fields is much higher and so my learning curve will be flatter), and also because I'm working as a full-time programmer so I prefer to do other things in my free time.