The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has already exerted an enormous impact on the entire world. Everything is overwhelmed in the face of a rapid escalation of cases. The countries that ...have already reported the peak of transmission are easing their preventive measures yet fearing a second wave of infection. If the virus causes that next wave, are we sufficiently prepared to deal with it? I argue that the stakeholders concerned should simultaneously handle the ongoing pandemic while making effective preparations for its second wave. To relax the preventive measures, countries must thoroughly revisit their situations based on scientific evidence.
The relationship between team size and productivity is a question of broad relevance across economics, psychology, and management science. For complex tasks, however, where both the potential ...benefits and costs of coordinated work increase with the number of workers, neither theoretical arguments nor empirical evidence consistently favor larger vs. smaller teams. Experimental findings, meanwhile, have relied on small groups and highly stylized tasks, hence are hard to generalize to realistic settings. Here we narrow the gap between real-world task complexity and experimental control, reporting results from an online experiment in which 47 teams of size ranging from n = 1 to 32 collaborated on a realistic crisis mapping task. We find that individuals in teams exerted lower overall effort than independent workers, in part by allocating their effort to less demanding (and less productive) sub-tasks; however, we also find that individuals in teams collaborated more with increasing team size. Directly comparing these competing effects, we find that the largest teams outperformed an equivalent number of independent workers, suggesting that gains to collaboration dominated losses to effort. Importantly, these teams also performed comparably to a field deployment of crisis mappers, suggesting that experiments of the type described here can help solve practical problems as well as advancing the science of collective intelligence.
On Friday November 13th at 9:20 pm, three kamikaze bombs went off around the Stade de France a stadium in Saint-Denis just outside Paris, 4 different shootings took place and bombings in Paris and ...hundreds of people were held hostage in a theater.This multi-site terrorist attack was the first of this magnitude in France. Drawing the lessons of these attacks and those which occurred in other countries from a health perspective is essential to continuously adapt and improve the French response to possible future attacks. Several issues would need to be further explored: Management of uncertainties: When to trigger the plans: after the 1st attack, the 2nd? When do attacks end and when to release mobilized resources? Management of victims: How to ensure that all victims are secured or taken care of? How to provide assistance when attacks are ongoing? Management of teams: Proper follow-up of persons involved in the response: health professionals, police and firemen, emergency call centers but also civil servants within administration that contributed to the response. Communication: Reactivity of all is a key element to secure appropriate resource is mobilized for the response. All actors have to be able to communicate quickly in a secured way.
Community resilience (CR)--ability to withstand and recover from a disaster--is a national policy expectation that challenges health departments to merge disaster preparedness and community health ...promotion and to build stronger partnerships with organizations outside government, yet guidance is limited. A baseline survey documented community resilience-building barriers and facilitators for health department and community-based organization (CBO) staff. Questions focused on CBO engagement, government-CBO partnerships, and community education. Most health department staff and CBO members devoted minimal time to community disaster preparedness though many serve populations that would benefit. Respondents observed limited CR activities to activate in a disaster. The findings highlighted opportunities for engaging communities in disaster preparedness and informed the development of a community action plan and toolkit.
In summary the SREX report provides information on how: 'Natural climate variability and human-generated climate change influence the frequency, intensity, spatial extent, and duration of some ...extreme weather and climate events; 'The vulnerability of exposed human society and ecosystems interacts with these events to determine impacts and the likelihood of disasters; 'Different development pathways can make future populations more or less vulnerable to extreme events; 'Experience with climate extremes and adaptation to climate change provides lessons on ways to better manage current and future risks related to extreme weather and climate events, and; 'Populations can become more resilient before disasters strike.' The effectiveness of particular policies and measures depend on local circumstances, including topography, development pathway, social and cultural context, financial and human resources, and other factors. ...the report provides general evidence for effectiveness of particular options, which may need to be reconsidered in the context of a specific location and time.
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