News Room

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.  

Acute shortages of respirators and face masks reveal that our far-flung sourcing of goods is unfit to deal with a prolonged pandemic or other widespread, long-lasting crisis.

Tempers are getting short. Supplies of ground beef even shorter. People are looking into each other’s shopping carts. Is that guy really going to use all four cans of chickpeas? That’s a lot of emergency hummus.