News Room

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.

It seemed like an offer that couldn’t be refused. Georgia would be able to get a million medical masks from Shanghai. “I have a businessman,’’ the sender wrote, “that can get an airplane full of medical mask (sic) every other day.”

While the coronavirus has hit the United States with a vengeance, some lucky cities have escaped unharmed thus far. However, even if your city has 0 or few known cases, the threat COVID-19 poses remains large. We all need to be prepared for the next phase of this pandemic that’s looming around the corner, which will likely spread more widely within states, hitting areas that have so far been unscathed.