News Room

In research that I undertook with my colleagues from Yale University and the University of Texas, we took a deep dive into the decision making of the World Health Organization (WHO) during the Ebola outbreak of 2014–2016. We wanted to compare and contrast its actions against those of Doctors Without Borders over the same period to determine when public health officials should raise the alarm about a global health emergency. Even though the clinical characteristics of the coronavirus are different from those of Ebola, the way public health authorities currently approach and frame the problem of controlling the current epidemic seem quite similar. This should concern us.  

The World Health Organization has been criticized for being slow to declare a public health emergency and a pandemic as COVID-19 spread. Yale SOM’s Saed Alizamir, with Francis de Véricourt of ESMT and Shouqiang Wang of the University of Texas at Dallas, recently published a study that uses game theory to play out the tradeoffs that the WHO and other public agencies face as they try to give timely warnings while maintaining their credibility. We asked them what their findings say about the response to COVID-19.

Lessons learned from failures during COVID-19 include not relying on a single supplier overseas and finding ones that are closer to their customers, experts say.

The world is in desperate need of protective gear to keep health care workers safe and ventilators to help severely ill COVID-19 patients breathe. In the face of massively increased demand and stalled supply chains, engineers are scrambling to redesign equipment so it can be produced outside of specialized factories.

Sixteen million Americans and counting have filed for unemployment benefits in the past three weeks. Most states in the country are under stay-at-home orders which have meant nonessential businesses have shut their doors and laid off workers.