Healthcare Infrastructure Resilience in response to COVID-19
David D Woods (the Ohio State Univ) David L Alderson (Naval Postgraduate School) hosted by Thomas P Seager (Arizona State Univ)
COVID isn’t over until we have the capacity to respond.
Without data from hospitals on admits and capacity, responding to COVID is like racing thru the fog. Adaptive capacity requires reframing, openness to new data, and avoiding commitments to irreversible strategies.
Quarantine measures are expensive. Do we know that they will save lives in the United States? And how do we know when it is time to relax them?
The data that is available right now focuses on confirmed cases, and deaths due to COVID-19, but the critical variables are the rate of increase in cases requiring hospitalization and critical care, compared with the rate at which new capacity in healthcare infrastructure can be created (thus avoiding saturation of intensive care units). The data we need is not yet available, clouding decisions with a fog of uncertainty.
As Dr. Woods explains, a resilience engineering response to COVID-19 can be organized by adapting in three different ways: 1) deploy existing resources, 2) mobilize reserve resources, and 3) generate new resources. All three are in evidence in the current COVID-19 response, yet the dominant analyses of “flatten the curve” fail to acknowledge that healthcare capacity is not static.
This is the first series of interviews on responding to COVID-19 with a resilience, rather than a risk approach. Drs. David D Woods and Thomas P Seager make a distinction between what is driving the public discourse and what resilience engineering has to offer.
Thomas Seager