Healthcare

In developing COVID-19 policies and managing supply chains the constant drumbeat is “data-driven decisions” where the new high priests are data scientists. Data by itself is not sufficient, the missing critical success factor is “models” to project the impact of decisions. One critical area for COVID-19 public policy is understanding the impact of different group sizes on the spread of COVID-19. This blog will provide a few examples of being “COVID-19 data adrift without operations management” and illustrate that a simple model that can be coded in a few hours provides more insight than is possible with just data for the group size question.

With COVID infections surging across the U.S. and Thanksgiving celebrations expected to have given the coronavirus more opportunities to spread, experts fear the country will soon experience a record number of deaths from the disease—something equivalent to the 2,977 people killed on 9/11 per day—by Christmas. In the past week alone, 10,288 people died of COVID in the U.S., with the current death toll of 267,302, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control website that was updated Tuesday. On average in the past week, 1,469 people died of COVID each day.

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.