News Room

Patients with COVID-19 have inundated hospitals in Italy, forcing doctors to make agonizing decisions about who should receive lifesaving care. Patient surges could soon demand distressing triage decisions in U.S. intensive care units (ICUs), too. As of Thursday, there were more than 13,000 confirmed cases in the U.S., and the nationwide death toll had risen to 175.

News about COVID-19 changes rapidly, which can leave many feeling confused about what they should do to protect themselves and others.

Coronavirus is well on its way to overwhelming US hospitals, but the capacity of health care systems varies widely from state-to-state and even city by city, and new data reveals which areas will be hit hardest.  

One-by-one over the past several weeks, Washington has gone through the steps at its disposal, each one more stringent and disruptive than the last, to limit the spread of the novel coronavirus.

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.