The World Health Organization (WHO) and Public Health England (PHE) have been widely criticised for their response to the Covid-19 pandemic. Serious questions have been asked regarding their competence.
Socio-economic systems should be understood as ‘complex’ phenomena that cannot effectively be controlled or managed through central planning. In general, markets and other decentralised governance mechanisms that rely on competition and signalling are better placed to facilitate learning and adaptation in conditions of complexity.
Covid–19 is provoking a major reorientation of the foreign policy of the US and Europe. At the heart of this is their changing relationship with China. Before the Coronavirus there were concerns over the actions of the Chinese government, but the pandemic has given rise to fears of a new Cold War.
The Covid-19 crisis has provided many grim examples of some familiar problems in health economics and cost-benefit analysis, and of the ‘tragic choices’ that sometimes need to be made.
The seminal work on epidemiological models was carried out in the late 1920s and early 1930s. The models have developed substantially since then, but their key drivers are still essentially those discovered nearly a century ago.
This paper argues that testing participation – and not testing capacity – is the biggest obstacle to a successful “test and isolate” strategy, as recently proposed by Paul Romer.
Pandemics are a recurring feature of human history. In the modern world, since the 1770s, we have had a series of pandemics, with a series of cholera ones in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and a series of five influenza ones since 1890.
The COVID-19 pandemic is a serious challenge for societies around the world. In response to it not only individuals are changing their behaviour, but also governments are taking various policy actions.