Risk Analysis and Decision Making for Covid-19

Covid-19 Worries Exercise
A short exercise to help rank worries about, and consider suggestions for ways to address the risks of your highest ranked worries related to Covid-19. You may be surprised that your intuition about which worries have the highest risk based on your personal perspectives is not always very good and the improved rankings with this exercise will allow you to focus on suggestions to address the more risky ones rather than those that are less risky.

A Rational Approach Toward Reopening the Economy
A rational approach to ‘reopening’ -which will play out over and over again as time progresses. This process involves identifying alternative strategies for specific situations (e.g. restaurants and professional sporting events) assessing the risks of each strategy, and choosing the best strategy based on trade-offs among competing objectives.

Planning for the Next Pandemic
Planning and allocating resources for the next pandemic is, today, an obvious thing to do. But if we don’t begin to do it now, it will be difficult to overcome the human tendency for decision makers to gamble on the next pandemic not happening in their lifetime. We now realize that our decision makers chose not to spend about $10B to $20B preparing for the current pandemic which is costing $10T or more –with many more lives lost than if the investment in risk reduction had been made. In order to address the shortcomings in the political and budgetary prioritization of pandemic preparedness, improved risk analytics are required to identify specific risks, estimate their likelihoods and impacts, using both data as well as human judgment, and in a comprehensive, scientifically valid process. A risk management process is now available to help guide decision making bodies in arriving at sound, defensible decisions when planning for future pandemics. How can we estimate whether an OUNCE OF PREVENTION IS WORTH MORE THAN A POUND OF CURE?

To learn more, see: Background and Motivation.