Applying Engineering Lessons to Pandemic Management

The COVID-19 pandemic has produced challenges that are commonly dealt with in engineering in the United States. Policy responses to the pandemic could be improved with lessons from other types of infrastructure, and by investing in “efficient resilience” when it comes to medical infrastructure.

Engineering professors Braden Allenby and Mikhail Chester take a close look at how engineered systems such as electric power, communications and transportation infrastructures deal with peak load, disaster recovery, and partial failure to offer ideas for building greater resilience into the US medical system and infrastructures that provide critical services during pandemics.