COVID-19 Pandemic: Is History Doomed to Repeat Itself?
Vicki Bier, Ph.D., University of Wisconsin, discusses lessons learned from the 1918 Spanish Flu Pandemic.
Announcing the results of the 2026 INFORMS Board of Directors election and the new board for 2027.
INFORMS has named 12 distinguished leaders as the 2026 class of INFORMS Fellows, one of the highest honors in the profession.
Most medical devices do not hit the market through rigorous safety testing but by being deemed similar enough to something already approved—the “predicate” device through a mechanism known as the FDA’s 510(k) pathway. But similar is not a synonym for safe. While the assumption may be that substantial equivalence is a reasonable stand-in for a safety review, a share of devices cleared with this method still get recalled, and the FDA spends valuable time reviewing devices the same way, regardless of how risky it is on paper.
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Vicki Bier, Ph.D., University of Wisconsin, discusses lessons learned from the 1918 Spanish Flu Pandemic.
More than three weeks after 413,000 Wisconsin voters went to the polls, there has not been the spike in COVID-19 cases attributed to the election that many feared.
Mayor Bill de Blasio doesn’t want to just restart the city’s economy, sighs Seth Barron at City Journal — he wants to “transform” it. “For six boom years,” he spent “tens of billions” pursuing his “equity agenda” and hiring “tens of thousands of new municipal employees.” Yet his message as the city faces the coronavirus “sounds strikingly similar to his message pre-crisis.” In fact, de Blasio “has spoken of the ‘transformative’ nature of his administration so often that it prompts groans from anyone outside his closest orbit.” Meanwhile, “homeless people fill New York’s subways,” crime is on the rise and tenants have “no idea” how to pay their rent. With the city “spiraling into crisis,” the mayor “continues to sound the one note he knows how to play — about unfairness and inequality” — even though “his instrument is out of tune.”
New data shows Wisconsinites might be growing less compliant with social distancing measures meant to slow the spread of COVID-19. But public health researchers say "quarantine fatigue" isn't a reason to give up on the restrictions.
After more than a month of the national lockdown aimed at stemming the spread of COVID-19, plans for how the United States can move back toward normalcy have begun to emerge. The centerpiece of discussion has been the extent to which the country is able to massively ramp up accurate testing for the virus — a point of contention between the White House and leaders in the most heavily affected states since the outbreak’s earliest days.

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