This article was first published on April 20, 2020.
The world is being flooded with data and models attempting to predict how the COVID-19 pandemic will unfold for our healthcare systems and economies. Unfortunately, trying to create static point estimates — whether that is active cases, R0, lockdowns, GDP, recovery rates — is a fool’s errand at this point in time. This can be seen in the wild disparity in estimates from experts, whether epidemiologists or economists, and in the gyrations of the financial markets.
In Insight #1 of our series, we introduce you to the modules of the Pandemic Navigator and how it can be used to make informed real-time decisions across financial services, healthcare and government.
This disparity is understandable: even with the best analytics, we face profound unknowns that will have major impacts on how the pandemic will play out within the epidemiology, the economy, political dynamics, and the eventual emergence of useful therapeutics and a vaccine. There are also critical differences in lockdown measures across countries and in government schemes to mitigate economic impacts. There are major unknowns in how consumers and business will respond and how behaviors and preferences may have been permanently altered.
In short, the debate about whether the recovery could be V-shaped, U-shaped, L-shaped, and so on is too simplistic and in many ways diverting attention away from more important topics.
What business leaders need are tools that provide multiple plausible scenarios, observe what is happening in real-time, and help orient leaders dynamically around probable futures.
Our Pandemic Navigator fulfills this role — enabling the right decisions to be taken at appropriate times and follow through with the actions needed
Our Pandemic Navigator combines huge quantities of observable data that allow us to model pandemic containment actions and reactions across more than 40 countries globally and each industry sector. We are expanding the breadth and depth of the datasets driving these results daily.
As a result, we can observe what is happening globally in real time and update the likelihood of scenarios tailored to a specific industry and region. The tool is being used to support our clients in decisions from restarting production in consumer goods companies through to estimating credit losses for banks.
Oliver Wyman's Pandemic Navigator
The Pandemic Navigator predicts the growth and peak of COVID-19 cases and the impact of containment and suppression measures across nearly 40 countries. Watch our video below.
