News Room

With COVID infections surging across the U.S. and Thanksgiving celebrations expected to have given the coronavirus more opportunities to spread, experts fear the country will soon experience a record number of deaths from the disease—something equivalent to the 2,977 people killed on 9/11 per day—by Christmas. In the past week alone, 10,288 people died of COVID in the U.S., with the current death toll of 267,302, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control website that was updated Tuesday. On average in the past week, 1,469 people died of COVID each day.

Temperatures are dropping, nights are growing longer, the holidays are nearing, and the science is clear: The pandemic is far from over. A long, dark winter awaits. The number of new coronavirus cases in the United States each day has ballooned from fewer than 40,000 in early September to more than 100,000 in early November. The U.S. now confirms more cases in a single day than China has reported altogether since the pandemic began.

The United States could be the first country to launch one of the most ambitious vaccine operations in history: distributing and administering up to 600 million doses of a COVID-19 vaccine in just a few months. Massive vaccine campaigns are nothing new — they have been carried out for decades in the fight against measles and influenza, for example.

Delivering a vaccine for a global pandemic that has caused nearly 1.5 million deaths and has infected more than 64 million people – as of early December 2020 – will require a logistical effort of extraordinary complexity. In the following Q&A, Associate Professor Tinglong Dai of the Johns Hopkins Carey Business School offers insights into the process of administering COVID-19 vaccines in the United States as well as in other parts of the world. Dai is an expert in operations management and business analytics, with a focus on the health care industry.

Reports of spiking COVID-19 cases and related fatalities have been met with recent news of extremely promising vaccines developed by Pfizer and Moderna. With the two offerings promising 90 and 95 percent effectiveness against the virus, respectively, attention now turns to mass production and, more importantly, mass distribution. According to Anna Nagurney, Ph.D., Director of the Virtual Center for Supernetworks and professor at the Department of Operations and Information Management at the University of Massachusetts, distribution is where the biggest challenges lie.