Resilience

Climate change has increased the destructive force of natural disasters, knocking down power lines and leaving thousands in the dark. You don’t realize how much of your life depends upon a steady electricity stream until authorities say it may be weeks until service returns.

Here’s how natural disasters impact our energy security, what we can do about it and what hurdles we must first overcome.    ...

Researchers draw insights from COVID-19 to inform improved health care in times of crisis (medicalxpress.com)

In research recently published in Nature Medicine, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute's Jianxi Gao, Ph.D., associate professor of computer science, and his team measured the resilience and adaptability of our health care system to disruptions caused by COVID-19. Resilience is a system's ability to absorb and recover from disruptions. Adaptability is a system's ability to learn from previous disturbances where there are recurrent disruptions. ...

"We found that our health care systems in the United States exhibit substantial adaptability, but only a moderate level of resilience," said Gao. "Our findings can inform the design of resilient and sustainable health care systems to prepare for future disruptions, whether they are caused by pandemics, climate change, conflicts, or anything else."

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Three lessons from Covid that could help global leaders prevent the next pandemic "If we wanted to, this could be the last pandemic. It's a political choice,” said Joanne Liu, a professor at McGill University’s School of Population and Global Health. Theresa Gaffney STAT

Everyone has things that, looking back, they would have done differently in the early days of 2020, had they known how the Covid-19 pandemic would tear across the globe. But those regrets may be particularly poignant for global leaders whose actions (or lack thereof) had direct impacts on how Covid-19 spread.