News Room

Lessons learned from failures during COVID-19 include not relying on a single supplier overseas and finding ones that are closer to their customers, experts say.

Coronavirus has sown chaos in food supply chains in a matter of weeks as consumers avoided restaurants and turned to grocery stores for a greater share of food purchases. Now, the companies that process and distribute food are figuring out how to catch up.

We talk to doctors and residents in top-ranked nations to understand how they’re managing the virus, and what continued challenges lie ahead for residents.

In research that I undertook with my colleagues from Yale University and the University of Texas, we took a deep dive into the decision making of the World Health Organization (WHO) during the Ebola outbreak of 2014–2016. We wanted to compare and contrast its actions against those of Doctors Without Borders over the same period to determine when public health officials should raise the alarm about a global health emergency. Even though the clinical characteristics of the coronavirus are different from those of Ebola, the way public health authorities currently approach and frame the problem of controlling the current epidemic seem quite similar. This should concern us.  

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.