This article presents nested scenarios to handle the uncertainty created by the COVID-19 pandemic. Our aim is to provide an organised framework to foresee the future of our world as it lives through the pandemic, while easing understanding. Such a comprehension, which brings together the past, the present and possible futures is necessary to allow …
Continue reading “Scenarios to Navigate the COVID-19 Pandemic and its Possible Futures (1)”
The COVID-19 and post-COVID-19 worlds are fraught with uncertainties. We still have to face many unknown regarding the disease and thus the pandemics (e.g. Julie Steenhuysen, “Scientists just beginning to understand the many health problems caused by COVID-19“, Reuters, 26 June 2020). Yet, we must take decisions and act when the fog clouds our horizon. …
Continue reading “Scenarios for the Covid-19 and Post-Covid-19 Worlds – a Bibliography”
This article, using scientific knowledge, looks at the COVID-19 dynamics of contagion to identify ideal measures that should be taken to stop contagion. These ideal measures, then, compared with real policies will allow assessing the potential for a second wave. Our aim, for this series, is to find ways to improve how we foresee if, …
Continue reading “Dynamics of contagion and the COVID-19 Second Wave”
This brief article is a first early warning about food insecurity resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic. The danger is rising and deserves further and more in-depth analysis and monitoring. As the COVID-19 pandemic developed, we immediately added food insecurity on our watch list of issues to monitor (see our COVID-19 section). To date, mid-May 2020, …
Continue reading “COVID-19 and Food Insecurity Early Warning”
The world is now struggling to know how to face the COVID-19 pandemic. We want to know how long the pandemic will last. Actually, what we want to know is when the pandemic will end and when life will be able to resume normally. As we explained in the opening article for this series, to …
Continue reading “COVID-19 Antiviral Treatments and Scenarios”
The COVID-19 pandemic is now a global fact. It still involves many uncertainties. At present and in the near future, we need to handle the ongoing pandemic as a global catastrophic crisis with complex cascading impacts. We also need to start thinking about reconstruction. We are here concerned with reconstruction that will allow polities to …
Continue reading “The COVID-19 Pandemic, Surviving and Reconstructing”
On 11 March Chancellor Merkel warned that the SARS-CoV-2 – the virus for the COVID-19 – could infect between 60 and 70% of Germany’s population (DW, “Coronavirus: Germany’s Angela Merkel urges ‘solidarity and reason‘”, 11 March 2020). She was accused to spread panic (Ibid.). Chancellor Merkel’s point was to highlight the very real danger Germans …
Continue reading “Worst Case Baseline Scenarios for the COVID-19 Pandemic”
As the COVID-19 spreads throughout the world, its cascading and multiple impacts deepen. As a result, fear spreads. Meanwhile, finance and business firms now started promoting the idea that the COVID-19 epidemic was a “black swan event”. For example, Goldman Sachs, in its Top of Mind, issue 86 (February 28, 2020) featured an article titled …
Continue reading “Why the COVID-19 is NOT a Black Swan Event”
Political risk is an idea many actors very often use. But what does political risk mean? What does political risk address? With the video below, we explain what is political risk. Meanwhile, we experiment with a new medium. We also test an approach through brief explanations of fundamental concepts and ideas. Let us know what …
When dealing with the future, we use a language that includes specific notions such as the expression of probability and of impacts. In terms of probability, for example, we use words such as “likely” and for impacts terms such as “severe”. Furthermore, to be truly complete, we should add a confidence judgement. As explained by …
Continue reading “Expressing and Understanding Estimative Language”
