Coronavirus

Former Foreign Minister Yoon Young-Kwan and Joseph Nye, professor emeritus at Harvard Kennedy School, discuss COVID-19 challenges at a forum hosted by the Korean Foundation and Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center and broadcast live on YouTube on Wednesday.

The U.S. response to the novel coronavirus divides many Americans along partisan lines. Democrats criticize President Donald Trump for a mismanaged response with grave consequences, and Republicans defend him, downplaying the need for social distancing and measures that ensure it.

Stephen Walt offers what he considers to be the top five silver linings from the COVID-19 pandemic.

For anyone past the age of retirement, 2020 has been the year of the village. Cities have been risky — the excess mortality rates from COVID-19 are higher for London than for England, much higher for Madrid than Spain, and vastly higher for New York than for the United States.

Dan Snow is joined by Calder Walton to talk about whether there was a huge intelligence failure around the outbreak of the pandemic, but also whether our intelligence communities are properly organized to realistically evaluate the real nature of the threats to our societies. He also has a bold idea to help avoid a future recurrence.

In developing countries, where the coronavirus pandemic is potentially at its most dangerous and costly, the authors call for governments to work with academic institutions to build and sustain computational modelling capacity.

The Covid-19 recession started with a sudden shuttering of many businesses, a nationwide decline in consumption and massive increase in unemployment. But starting around April 15, when economic reopening started to spread but the overall numbers still looked grim, Furman noticed some data that pointed to the kind of recovery that economists often see after a hurricane or industrywide catastrophe like the Gulf of Mexico oil spill.

Cristine Russell details how the seasonal scientific field work in the Arctic — from the Toolik Field Station on Alaska's North Slope to ice core drilling in Greenland — is being postponed or cancelled this year because of the deadly COVID-19 pandemic.

On February 24, three weeks before Harvard closed its doors amid the pandemic, James Comey came to the Kennedy School of Government. When asked for advice on how “to prioritize integrity and truth over partisanship,” he told the students: “Know that you will die someday.” That unexpected answer sparked some giggles in the audience.

It is said that operations research was a decisive factor contributing to the allied victory in World War II. General Doolittle expressed his appreciation for operations analysts, the data scientists of his time, saying they made “substantial contributions toward the success of the Eighth Air Force.” General Carl Spaatz expressed his appreciation for his data scientists during the war, describing them as essential, and prophetically stated, “[w]e all hope that no similar national crisis will arise in the future...  [i]f that time ever comes we shall call upon you again as we called on you before.”  I believe that time of national crisis has arrived.