COVID-19 Actuaries Response Group

What degree of compliance do we need?

Bulletin 80 | Gordon Woo

According to a King’s College survey, the UK compliance figure for contacts is only 11%.

For the UK reproduction number R to fall below 1, there must be a vast improvement in public compliance with quarantine. To limit the spread of COVID-19 in large households, infected individuals would need to move to special quarantine hotels. This isolation strategy has been successful in China and Israel, and would address the problem of contagion spreading within large multi-generational households, many of which are BAME families.

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Gordon Woo

Catastrophist - Risk Management Solutions

Dr. Gordon Woo is an architect of the RMS LifeRisks pandemic risk model, which was developed in 2006, at the time of the H5N1 avian flu crisis.

He has contributed widely to the IFoA literature on pandemics, including writing an actuarial perspective on pandemics for the special pandemics edition of the 2015 longevity bulletin, and an article on the age-dependence of the 1918 pandemic.

His IFoA talk on extreme pandemic scenarios in September 2016 included an alternative more transmissible version of MERS, which has similarities with COVID-19.

Trained at Cambridge, MIT and Harvard, he is a visiting professor at UCL, and a visiting professor at NTU, Singapore.

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