News Room

Hot-spot Midwestern states have reported modest declines in new daily COVID-19 cases over the past few days, but epidemiologists have warned against taking this as a sign that the surge is over. “I think it is premature to feel that we turned the corner until we see at least a week or two to have sort of [a] decline,” said Dr. Oguzhan Alagoz, an expert in healthcare analytics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

The holiday season is officially here and the General Services Administration (GSA) has notified President-elect Joe Biden that his transition can begin. Among his top priorities is his seven-point plan to combat the spread of COVID-19. The Trump administration has mentioned all these points at some point, with support ranging from neglect to passive endorsement. While the Trump approach tipped the scale towards economic recovery, the Biden approach focuses more heavily on public health benefits. The likely optimal path lies somewhere in between, with real-time adjustments needed to steer the nation forward based on the current state of affairs.

In early 2020, when COVID-19 was still just a vague threat to most in the U.S., a group of researchers at Yale were brainstorming about the virus that would shut down Yale and the state by mid-March. "It was late February, so we were still meeting in person, and talking about different sorts of research projects," said Edward Kaplan, the William N. and Marie A. Beach Professor of Operations Research at the Yale School of Management.

When the University of Washington became the first major U.S. campus to close its doors due to the global COVID-19 outbreak on March 6, almost no one could have predicted the pandemic would have swelled to the massively widespread proportions now disrupting higher ed across the country.

At the start of the school year, Cornell University implemented a strategy of regular testing and robust contact tracing on campus. The plan was expensive, but it’s prevented any major COVID-19 outbreaks at the New York institution.