Big Data, Government Policy and Defeating COVID

Zoom Webinar

From epidemic to pandemic, from Delta to Omicron, the world has been fighting COVID for two years. Different countries have adopted unique strategies.  Some believe COVID will become endemic, the virus will not disappear and the disease will be constantly present.  They have started lifting travel and quarantine restrictions.

Mainland China, Hong Kong SAR and other geographies have maintained a policy of strictly controlling transmission in an approach called “dynamic clearance” to resolutely prevent COVID’s continuous spread in communities.

Hong Kong has successfully remained relatively COVID-free in the past 6 months, but with the emergence of the Omicron variant, the number of new cases has spiked to over a thousand daily, threatening its COVID-free bubble.   Should the dynamic clearance strategy be leveraged in Hong Kong, and at what cost?

Despite the different goals and approaches to managing COVID, data plays an important role in the policy-making process. How have countries and organizations been tracking COVID by data visualization and analytics? How has data affected the implementation and adaptation of policy?

Please join us to hear our UChicago faculty and panel of experts discuss tracking COVID in Asia and the West, and learn what’s next for Hong Kong.

February 24, 2022
9:30pm      Japan | South Korea
8:30pm      Hong Kong | Beijing | Singapore
6:00pm      Delhi
1:30pm       Paris
12:30pm     London
6:30am      Chicago

Speakers

Benjamin John Cowling
Professor, Chair of Epidemiology
Division Head of Epidemiology and Biostatistics
School of Public Health, Li Ka Shing Faculty of Medicine
The University of Hong Kong

Marynia Kolak, PhD
Associate Director for Health Informatics
Center for Spatial Data Science
University of Chicago

Hao Zha
China Subnational Captain
Oxford COVID-19 Government Response Tracker (OxCGRT)
Blavatnik School of Government
University of Oxford

Moderator

Mark Barnekow (MBA '88)
Executive Director
The University of Chicago Francis and Rose Yuen Campus in Hong Kong