It has been difficult for healthcare systems and businesses to plan for the impact of coronavirus because of the lack of historical comparisons for outbreaks of this magnitude and severity. But the virus’ rapid spread across Asia, Europe and the United States is starting to generate a critical mass of data from which plausible – even likely – regional contagion scenarios are emerging, according to Barrie Wilkinson and Helen Leis, Partners at Guy Carpenter-affiliate Oliver Wyman.
Based on work with observed data collected thus far by the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Johns Hopkins Center for Systems Science and Engineering, we have been able not only to detect the effects of containment in limiting the growth in cases, but also to measure how the different containment measures across time and across regions have created variations in outcomes. As Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director general of the WHO, said recently, this is the first pandemic in history that we can contain.
