Healthcare

Delivering a vaccine for a global pandemic that has caused nearly 1.5 million deaths and has infected more than 64 million people – as of early December 2020 – will require a logistical effort of extraordinary complexity. In the following Q&A, Associate Professor Tinglong Dai of the Johns Hopkins Carey Business School offers insights into the process of administering COVID-19 vaccines in the United States as well as in other parts of the world. Dai is an expert in operations management and business analytics, with a focus on the health care industry.

Upwards of 267,000 people have so far died in the U.S. from the novel coronavirus, and experts have fatalistic predictions about more infections throughout the winter. But it’s not just the coronavirus that’s killing people. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign computer scientist Sheldon Jacobson and Dr. Janet Jokela, acting dean of the University of Illinois College of Medicine at Urbana, examined Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data from March through May, the period early in the pandemic when states like Illinois had stay-at-home orders in effect.

Hot-spot Midwestern states have reported modest declines in new daily COVID-19 cases over the past few days, but epidemiologists have warned against taking this as a sign that the surge is over. “I think it is premature to feel that we turned the corner until we see at least a week or two to have sort of [a] decline,” said Dr. Oguzhan Alagoz, an expert in healthcare analytics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

In early 2020, when COVID-19 was still just a vague threat to most in the U.S., a group of researchers at Yale were brainstorming about the virus that would shut down Yale and the state by mid-March. "It was late February, so we were still meeting in person, and talking about different sorts of research projects," said Edward Kaplan, the William N. and Marie A. Beach Professor of Operations Research at the Yale School of Management.

At the start of the school year, Cornell University implemented a strategy of regular testing and robust contact tracing on campus. The plan was expensive, but it’s prevented any major COVID-19 outbreaks at the New York institution.

Overcrowding in emergency rooms is a costly and concerning global problem, compromising patient care quality and experience. In a new study, a researcher from The University of Texas at Dallas investigated whether telemedicine could enhance ER care delivery. "This longstanding problem is mainly driven by the imbalance between increasing patient flow and the shortage of emergency room capacity," said Dr. Shujing Sun, assistant professor of information systems in the Naveen Jindal School of Management and lead author of the study.

When one or more coronavirus vaccines receives FDA emergency use authorization, it will launch a public health and logistics initiative unlike any in U.S. history. Hundreds of millions of doses will have to distributed nationwide and kept cold until healthcare professionals can administer not one, but two doses to each person. And enough skeptical members of the population will have to be persuaded to receive the vaccine to slow virus transmission.

The multiple announcements of potential vaccine candidates in the fight against COVID-19 has been greeted positively around the world, but rolling out immunization to every Canadian who needs and wants it will be a bigger challenge than many campaigns of the past. And it all starts with having to keep things cold as ice — and then some — for far longer than with vaccines such as the flu shot.

The U.S. recorded more than 1 million cases of COVID-19 in the last seven days, Johns Hopkins University data shows, which is more than any other week since the pandemic began. There are 80,000 people currently hospitalized with COVID-19 and over 15,000 of these individuals are currently in intensive care units (ICUs) with nearly 5,000 on ventilators. These numbers are prodigious and make it clear to experts in the medical field that catastrophe in the health care world is not imminent — it has arrived.

Due to the extremely high virus activity level in Wisconsin, experts say there's no completely safe way to celebrate Thanksgiving with people who live outside your home. "Whenever you have so many people that are carrying the virus, then even small gatherings are a risk," Dr. Oguz Alagoz, who models infectious diseases at UW-Madison, said. That risk exists even at gatherings of close family if they aren't part of the same household. "We have so many people that are already carrying this virus, so it's very likely that one of your loved ones, knowingly or unknowingly, could transmit," he said.