News Room

The United States and South Korea announced its first case of coronavirus on the same day. In the following months South Korea has been widely praised for its response as life has largely returned to normal.

Andrew Revere Sr. flew to Cincinnati last week, visiting his fifth airport since March. His American Airlines flight marked the first time he was told to wear a mask. “I don’t want to make anybody uncomfortable. So, if they say to wear a mask then I’m going to put it on,” said Revere, an Atlanta resident who played pro football in Mexico until the coronavirus pandemic put an end to his season on March 14.

Lockdowns implemented in some countries to reduce transmission of the coronavirus were extremely effective at controlling its rapid spread and saved millions of lives, two new studies suggest. Shutdowns prevented or delayed an estimated 531 million coronavirus infections across six countries — China, South Korea, Iran, Italy, France and the United States — researchers from the University of California, Berkeley report June 8 in Nature.

The great challenge of something such as COVID-19 is that we don’t have the time to do decades of research to understand the effectiveness — or lack of effectiveness — of any given approach. We have to act. That means, though, that we could be “successful” at handling COVID-19 yet still fail society due to unmeasured impacts.

Christopher Tang, professor at UCLA's Anderson School of Management, describes what it will take for hospital and healthcare supply chains to recover from the COVID-19 pandemic. COVID-19 was a “wakeup call” for supply chains, Tang says. A nation that ostensibly has an abundance of materials discovered that it could be subject to serious shortages of critical supplies needed to fight a pandemic, such as personal protective equipment and ventilators. “We need to rethink how we can do better,” he says.