Purpose Early evidence suggests that coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) caused a sharp deterioration in fiscal accounts worldwide. This paper empirically assesses the impact of previous pandemics and epidemics. Design/methodology/approach Using large sample 170 countries from 2000 to 2018, this study relies on Jordà's (2005) local projection method trace pandemics' short- medium-term dynamic s...

Abstract The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic illustrated the inability of market to meet needed production scale and speed essential medical products. state should adopt a risk-based approach, allowing for experimentation with various technological solutions such as vaccines tests, while ramping up their production. intervention resolve uncertainty, combine resources, coordinate ch...

Will there be another human influenza pandemic? The certainty is that there will be, and the probability is that the virus will emerge from Eurasian aquatic bird reservoirs and involve reassortment between a human and avian strain, with accumulation of mutations or true recombinational events (or both) that will permit spread and pathogenicity among humans. This process will probably occur in p...

Until the beginning of the last century, infectious diseases were the major cause of human mortality, causing an estimated 50% of all deaths in the Western world around 1900. In the following decades, this percentage decreased to less than five, largely due to the implementation of public health measures but also to the development of vaccines and antimicrobial compounds. A major success in thi...

A recent approach for bioterrorism risk management calls for stricter regulations over biotechnology as a way to control subversion of technology that may be used to create a man-made pandemic. This approach is largely unworkable given the increasing pervasiveness of molecular techniques and tools throughout society. Emerging technology has provided the tools to design much deadlier pathogens b...

ABSTRACT An analytical model of a pandemic, initiated by a single focus and spreading over a continent, is developed using foci as the smallest units of disease and fields as the smallest units of host. A few generalizing assumptions lead to a parameter-sparse model that may answer general questions on pandemics in a qualitative manner. For pandemic spread of disease during one season, a 'withi...

This thesis reports on the use of Twitter during the 2009 H1N1 pandemic to explore its use as an “infoveillance” approach complementary to traditional surveys and content analysis. This study aimed to: 1) report on the use of “H1N1” versus “swine flu”, 2) conduct a qualitative analysis of tweet content, and 3) assess the feasibility of Twitter as a real-time content, sentiment, and public atten...