COVID-19 Actuaries Response Group

Lessons from 2020 on improving 2021

Bulletin 103 | Gordon Woo

Learning from pandemic experience is a continuous adaptive process, rather like the virus itself. With no severe pandemic in living memory, public health policy can be ‘exploratory’, and we need to correct our course as circumstances require.

Looking back at the challenges of 2020, we can draw constructive lessons on improving public health policy in 2021. This Bulletin looks at these lessons, split into three areas: following the science; following the rules; and following the virus.

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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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