News Room

As many airlines begin filling their middle seats and ending the era of social distancing on flights, a new research paper from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is raising questions about the risks associated with packing planes full of people.

Much like the internet isn’t one thing, the supply chain isn’t either. Instead, it’s a complex, symbiotic relationship between consumption and production that, in theory, is supposed to balance out. And usually it does. But when it doesn’t, you get the current toilet paper aisle at your favorite local grocery store with limited supplies. Four months ago, WABE’s host of “All Things Considered,” Jim Burress asked Georgia Institute of Technology’s Pinar Keskinocak to break down the concept of the supply chain. Monday, Keskinocak spoke to Burress again and gave an update, but she started the conversation with a reminder of what exactly the supply chain is.

When the Coronavirus outbreak transformed into a pandemic, government and civic authorities followed the traditional way of quarantine, test, detect, and treat. In Wuhan, China where the virus originated, authorities followed the pattern and were successful. Singapore too tailor-made a similar process and saw positive results.

As we approach the end of the fourth month since COVID-19 arrived in earnest in Illinois, the number of cases in the U.S. has passed 3.2 million, with over 130,000 deaths. Champaign County has now passed 1,000 cases, with 17 deaths to date.

The research study, to be published in the July/August issue of the INFORMS journal Marketing Science, is titled “Visual Listening In: Extracting Brand Image Portrayed on Social Media” and is authored by Liu Liu of the University of Colorado, Daria Dzyabura of the New Economics School in Russia, and Natalie Mizik of the University of Washington.