News Room

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.

Overcrowding in emergency rooms is a costly and concerning global problem, compromising patient care quality and experience. In a new study, a researcher from The University of Texas at Dallas investigated whether telemedicine could enhance ER care delivery. "This longstanding problem is mainly driven by the imbalance between increasing patient flow and the shortage of emergency room capacity," said Dr. Shujing Sun, assistant professor of information systems in the Naveen Jindal School of Management and lead author of the study.

When one or more coronavirus vaccines receives FDA emergency use authorization, it will launch a public health and logistics initiative unlike any in U.S. history. Hundreds of millions of doses will have to distributed nationwide and kept cold until healthcare professionals can administer not one, but two doses to each person. And enough skeptical members of the population will have to be persuaded to receive the vaccine to slow virus transmission.