This is the second post of the “Epidemic Modeling” series. We will be building up on our discussion from the first post, “Epidemic Modeling 101: Or why your CoVID-19 exponential fits are wrong”, so you might want to start reading there. You can find the notebooks I wrote to implement the models and generate the figures over at the GitHub repository I made specifically for this series:

Image: https://medium.com

Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said with coronavirus deaths still on the rise, it is 'time to keep the foot on the accelerator' of social distancing to ease the burden on hospitals.

Image: https://www.wral.com

For some organizations, near-term survival is the only agenda item. Others are peering through the fog of uncertainty, thinking about how to position themselves once the crisis has passed and things return to normal. The question is, ‘What will normal look like?’ While no one can say how long the crisis will last, what we find on the other side will not look like the normal of recent years.”

These words were written 11 years ago, amid the last global financial crisis, by one of our former managing partners, Ian Davis. They ring true today but if anything, understate the reality the world is currently facing.

First went the energy sector, second the stock-market, then the health-pandemic outbreak, soon flood and storm season return. These persistent shock waves of challenges and disasters do not allow for economies, companies, institutions nor individuals to absorb much less pause operationally, financially, nor emotionally. The "New Normal" is survival - not of the fittest but of those able to pivot their strategies and visions the fastest. Here are six economic, skill, and investment resilient strategies for the 21st Century Pivot. (And yes, you and your team have little time to conduct the typical whiteboard session, report preparation, spreadsheet development because The Pivot is now!)

Just before midnight on March 22nd, the President of the United States prepared to tweet. Millions of Americans, in the hope of safeguarding their health and fighting the rapidly escalating spread of covid-19, had already begun to follow the sober recommendation of Anthony S. Fauci, the country’s leading expert on infectious disease. Fauci had warned Americans to “hunker down significantly more than we as a country are doing.” Donald Trump disagreed. “we cannot let the cure be worse than the problem itself,” he tweeted.

Image: https://www.newyorker.com

A new study has begun recruiting at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, to determine how many adults in the United States without a confirmed history of infection with SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), have antibodies to the virus. The presence of antibodies in the blood indicates a prior infection. In this “serosurvey,” researchers will collect and analyze blood samples from as many as 10,000 volunteers to provide critical data for epidemiological models. The results will help illuminate the extent to which the novel coronavirus has spread undetected in the United States and provide insights into which communities and populations are most affected.

Image: Colorized scanning electron micrograph of an apoptotic cell (blue) infected with SARS-COV-2 virus particles (yellow), isolated from a patient sample. Image captured at the NIAID Integrated Research Facility (IRF) in Fort Detrick, Maryland. NIAID

A report posted on Wednesday suggests that despite the record amount of "dry powder" that venture firms have in their arsenal, they are likely to slow their deal flow in order to get through the economic crisis caused by the pandemic that is sweeping the globe.

Image: Jon Sakoda, founder of Cisco-based venture firm Decibel, says VCs would run out of money to invest if they maintain the pace of recent quarters and don't raise new funds. DECIBEL

The Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act—better known as the “CARES Act”—is the largest economic relief bill in U.S. history.  It represents a $2 trillion relief package designed to stabilize the U.S. economy.  Its flagship offering?  The “Paycheck Protection Program” (“PPP”), a loan initiative designed to provide funds to small businesses as they ride out the COVID-19 storm.  And a critical sector of the economy is asking one very important question: Do venture capital (“VC”)- and private equity (“PE”)-backed companies qualify for PPP loans?  

Could it be that the main reason most people choose never to start a business is due to fear?

It’s definitely from a lack of ideas. It seems like everyone I talk to, entrepreneur or not, have some business idea that they believe in. Yet, most never take their idea forward.

Some countries are using smartphone location data and other personal information to track coronavirus outbreaks or make sure people are staying home. There’s debate among public health experts in the United States about whether and how to follow their lead.

But this isn’t a black-and-white choice between personal liberty and saving lives. Not all citizen surveillance actually works in spotting or stopping illness. Even effective technology requires us to test many more Americans and have health care officials follow up.

Image: Jake Terrell 

Some states have found themselves in need of people who know a 60-year-old programming language called COBOL to retrofit the antiquated government systems now struggling to process the deluge of unemployment claims brought by the coronavirus crisis.

The states of Kansas, New Jersey, and Connecticut all experienced technical meltdowns after a stunning 6.6 million Americans filed for unemployment benefits last week.

A few months in, it is still hard to grasp the scale and scope of COVID-19’s global impact. A third of the world population is under some sort of “lockdown.” Over 200 countries are affected, and the number of new cases and deaths in many places are still growing exponentially. All the while, a second crisis, in the form of an economic recession, is underway.

America doesn’t have a plan to return to normal. The federal government’s failure to produce one could leave millions of workers, students and families stuck inside even after hospitals and first responders have weathered the initial crisis.

Reopening society, experts say, will require the regular testing of millions of people, a reliable and fast nationwide reporting network and an army of thousands of investigators tasked with tracking down those who may have been exposed to the virus. Experts have compared this to the effort to put a man on the moon and the Manhattan Project.

Image: https://www.pewtrusts.org

March 31 was Equal Pay Day in the US, which represents how long into the next year it would take the average working woman to earn as much as the average man earned during the previous year alone. The date highlights the gender pay gap in the US. 

It's a well-known fact that there is a gender pay gap, with women tending to earn less than men. It turns out that, in the US, that gap exists for workers of every age.

If you want to make a lot of money in your career, a medical occupation may be right for you.

Using the latest data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Occupational Employment Statistics program, we identified the 30 detailed occupations with the highest mean annual salaries as of May 2019, the most recent period for which data is available.

Image: Orlin Wagner/AP Images

The UCSF-Stanford Pediatric Device Consortium held its annual pitch competition via videoconference on March 30, awarding a total of $225,000 in seed funding to several companies working to develop health technology and medical devices for children.

“Our mission is to enable and accelerate health technology for children,” said James Wall, MD, co-principal investigator of the consortium, in his opening remarks at the start of the competition. Wall is a pediatric surgeon at Stanford Children’s Health.

Image: https://healthier.stanfordchildrens.org

7. Netskope $340.0M

Round: Series G

Description: Santa Clara-based Netskope is a software company that helps organizations understand online activities, protect data, stop threats, and respond to incidents. Founded by Sanjay Beri in 2012, Netskope has now raised a total of $740.1M in total equity funding and is backed by investors that include Sequoia Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Dell Technologies Capital, Sapphire Ventures, and Accel.

Researchers from Cambridge, U.K., and Germany have used a genetic network technique known as phylogenetic network analysis to reconstruct the early evolutionary paths of SARS-CoV-2 in humans as infection spread from Wuhan out to Europe and North America. By analyzing the first 160 complete viral genomes to be sequenced from human patients, the scientists say they have mapped some of the original spread of the new coronavirus through its mutations, which result in different viral lineages. The team’s results identified three central variants, A, B, and C, which spread differentially.

Beth Ferreira, a partner at FirstMark Capital, has lived and worked through the Dotcom crash of 2000, the 9/11 terror attacks, and the financial crisis of 2008. When the survival of your company — or entire market — is in question, she says strategies change, habits fall away, and goals are reassessed.

Ferreira has worked on both the investor and enterprise side of venture capital, and she explains that brands that are adaptive and proactive during a crisis can retrench and survive — or even thrive.

Many leaders have crossed the first hurdles of moving their teams remote: ensuring colleagues have set up their tech tools, defined their processes, and permanently logged into their video conference accounts.

But this is just the first step towards creating an effective work environment for remote employees. The next critical question we must ask is: How do you motivate people who work from home?