The past year has been both a devastating and illuminating experience for those responsible for protecting the United States from biological threats. With its significant toll on millions of lives, the national and global economy and national security, COVID-19 has been a wake-up call to how fragile our systems are and has tested our national response teams with its historic challenges.
The Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory was called to the national response in the early weeks of COVID-19, collaborating with our university partners on the newly created Johns Hopkins Covid Dashboard, which emerged as the global tool for maintaining situational awareness. Our government sponsors then invited us to support FEMA’s National Response Coordination Center and Health and Human Services’ Data Strategy and Execution Workgroup, where we have enabled rapid analyses for decision-making in operations, and integrated data from many state and local governments and foreign countries. We have responded to a range of requests for applied science research from across the government.
Three challenges stand out as testing our nation’s ability to counter emerging biological threats. First, we lack understanding of the fundamental characteristics of biological systems. In physics, we talk about first principles: whether we know the details of a threat or not, we can usually rely on the laws of physics to help bound the problem. When it comes to biology, we don’t have a first-principles understanding of all the aspects we need to predict or even understand what we might be facing, nor the tools to understand how the dynamics of biology, environment and individual behavior affect each other.
The genome of the novel coronavirus was sequenced within weeks of reported cases, yet that provided little insight into how deadly it was, how transmissible it was, how it att ..
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