News Room

Earlier this month, news circulated of some optimistic projections from a COVID-19 model made by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation.

If colleges billed their students at the end of four years and didn't show us prices beforehand, it would wreck mass chaos. Or if airlines billed us at the end of flights and did not show us prices, it would lead to unstable markets. Both cases would enable price gouging and ultimately pricing failure. Our healthcare is designed around a similar consumerist regime and a global pandemic exposes the inequities of our healthcare system. 

So far, Australia has been doing pretty well in the fight against COVID-19. Using a combination of social distancing, tight travel restrictions and contact tracing, the country has kept its death toll under 100 people and seems to be leveling off its new cases. It’s even managed to avoid closing schools. But despite the relatively minor impact the novel coronavirus has had on life in Australia, medical workers are still running low on masks, gloves and gowns.

Flexibility and patience will be key for all of us, as the U.S. and global economies reopen, post-COVID-19. According to Tinglong Dai, professor of Operations Management and Business Analytics at the Johns Hopkins Carey Business School, the post-recovery outlook will be progressive, and will entail a lot of back and forth, he says.

I am an industrial engineer who studies health systems and how people make decisions under uncertainty. Engineers like me build models precisely to understand events like the global coronavirus pandemic and its impact on the economy, the supply chain, our education system and our health system. While the popular press has discussed epidemiological models to help us understand how the disease spreads and when cases might peak, my area of modeling can help us make better decisions and better policy.