Virtual Special Issue: The Impact of Operations in the COVID-19 Pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic has touched our lives in an unprecedented way all around the globe during the last two years. Unfortunately, this pandemic has created many challenges the Operations community is uniquely skilled to tackle. I am proud to say that the community has been rising to the task. As a result, Manufacturing & Service Operations Management is launching a virtual special issue that aims to highlight how our community is helping to deal with this pandemic in many different ways. These papers address issues that range from (i) how the pandemic has affected the retail space, highlighting the importance of logistics infrastructure (ii) to how universities can schedule courses in order to operate with in-person learning in a safe and socially distant environment, (iii) to how workforce productivity has been affected for female versus male researchers. These papers are just examples that discuss very different problems and as a result, showcase the diversity of problems this pandemic has surfaced where our field can and is contributing. It is also interesting to notice that these papers utilize a diversity of tools that range from data analysis to econometrics, optimization and machine learning. We hope that these papers will highlight the contributions the field of Operations is having in an important problem that has impacted the whole world in a critical way.

Brief Description

During the COVID-19 pandemic, limited testing capacity forced difficult choices about who should be tested. Early guidance from policymakers focused on testing those most likely to be infected. This study shows that the best testing policy depends on the specific goal, such as starting treatment or ending quarantine, and on how likely the test is to give an inaccurate result. When samples are combined in “pooled tests” to conserve resources, the most effective approach may involve testing both high- and low-risk individuals. The study proposes a simple heuristic that can help health officials make better use of limited testing supplies.

Brief Description

This OM Forum article uses micro-level U.S. import data to examine how firms restructured their global supply chains during the COVID-19 pandemic. The authors find that while geographic sourcing shifted away from China and toward countries like Vietnam, India, and Mexico, companies also diversified their supplier bases within existing regions. Changes in delivery patterns—for larger, less frequent shipments—reflect broad shifts in supply chain strategy driven by the pandemic-related disruption. The paper provides practical implications for managing future disruptions and outlines a rich research agenda for understanding global supply chain resilience in an era of increasing uncertainty and geopolitical risk.

Brief Description

In response to the global labor shortage exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, we propose innovative staffing strategies that leverage flexible capacities (e.g., travel nurses) to mitigate the adverse impacts of worker shortages. Our multi-stage, multi-flexibility staffing methodology effectively reduces the system cost associated with high staffing expenses and prolonged service delays during severe shortages. Incorporating flexible staffing also alleviates overutilization of long-term staff, preventing worker burnout in understaffed systems and ultimately improving the quality of service in the long run. A case study using data from Ochsner Health System during the pandemic validates the effectiveness of our theoretical solutions, demonstrating annual Emergency Department cost savings of at least half a million dollars across three Ochsner hospitals.

Brief Description

This paper explores the impact of retail store closures on omnichannel sales and shopping behavior during the COVID-19 pandemic, leveraging a natural experiment stemming from varied regional responses in the U.S. to store closures. Analyzing data from a luxury fashion retailer, the study finds that online orders increase by 24% in areas where stores close, helping to partially offset offline sales losses. Additionally, new e-shoppers tend to select popular models to minimize mismatch risk, suggesting an opportunity for retailers to target these customers with promotions or virtual fitting tools to further support online shopping.

Brief Description

The paper studies the impact of individual choices on the effectiveness of public health policies, such as social distancing and lockdowns, during the COVID-19 pandemic. Employing a combination of mathematical models and data analytics, it seeks to understand how individuals' perceptions of disease risk and their responses to public health interventions impact the overall success of these policies. The study reveals that individuals tend to engage in activities at levels exceeding what is socially optimal because they do not fully recognize the negative effects of their actions on others. Consequently, the implementation of public health measures during periods of moderate disease prevalence may be equally or even more critical than during periods of peak prevalence. The findings emphasize that policymakers should consider individual behaviors when designing and implementing public health policies for effectively managing infectious disease outbreaks.

Brief Description

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought unprecedented stress to intensive care units, leading to an 'all hands on deck' response, where nursing teams endure extended periods of consecutive working days without breaks. This study of nursing teams in 62 German neonatal intensive care units reveals that such prolonged work periods negatively impact patient care quality, particularly under low staffing. The research highlights the necessity of effectively managing work schedules to maintain high standards of patient care. Additionally, it suggests that regulators should consider augmenting nurse-to-patient ratio guidelines with limits on consecutive working days.

Brief Description

The COVID-19 pandemic necessitated novel end-to-end modeling as initial forecasting affected downstream policy and mitigation strategies. In this work we focus on one such work stream of forecasting detected cases and deaths, extrapolating to underlying prevalence and then allocating vaccine dosages across regions. As part of the paper, we highlight the benefits of ML-based aggregation of distinct models, the challenges of underlying prevalence detection and the importance of exposure and risk in vaccine allocation. Finally we discuss how this work has been part of the CDC forecasting efforts and MIT’s process for reopening the institute.

Brief Description

As COVID-19 continues to disrupt offline retail, anecdotal evidence suggests a rapid growth of e-commerce. However, the pandemic may also significantly decrease supply chain capacity, which in turn decreases e-commerce sales. Then, how does e-commerce respond to COVID-19? We use sales data from Alibaba, representing all buyers and sellers on the platform across 339 cities in mainland China, and find a systematic drop and recovery pattern of e-commerce sales during Wuhan shutdown, which illustrates the digital resilience of e-commerce. More importantly, we identify a key operational driver—logistics capacity—that significantly explains the decline and recovery of e-commerce sales. It highlights the importance of logistics infrastructure in building a resilient e-commerce operations.

Brief Description

Physical distancing requirements during the COVID-19 pandemic dramatically reduced the effective capacity of university campuses, compelling universities to consider novel policies to efficiently use newly-scarce resources. We projected that if MIT moved from its usual two-semester calendar to a three-semester calendar, over 90% of student-courses could be satisfied on campus without increasing faculty workloads. At MIT Sloan, we produced a new schedule that was implemented in Fall 2020. Despite a fourfold reduction in classroom capacity, we afforded two thirds of Sloan students the opportunity for in-person learning in at least half their courses, while adhering to safety guidelines.

Brief Description

This paper shows that the COVID-19 pandemic, which has forced many people to work from home, is exacerbating gender inequality. As women are, on average, carry out disproportionately more childcare, domestic labor, and household responsibilities, they are likely to be more affected than men. By comparing female and male researchers’ productivity before and after the pandemic, we find that female researchers’ productivity dropped by 13.2 percent relative to that of male researchers, suggesting that the pandemic has significantly enlarged the productivity gap between female and male researchers. Our work calls for the awareness of this inequality and highlights the need for society to act.

Brief Description

We review 75 pandemics/epidemics-related research papers published in significant operations management journals through the end of 2019. The papers are categorized, summarized, and synthesized under these clusters: warning signals/surveillance, disease propagation, mitigation, vaccines/ therapeutics development, resource management, supply chain configuration, decision support systems, and risk assessment. We consider the significant pandemics/epidemics stakeholders like policymakers, healthcare administrators, business executives, educational administrators, householders, and researchers and highlight the associated issues. Finally, the paper suggests future research directions regarding disease prediction, mitigation and intervention, socio-political and economic Consequences, national culture, resource planning, and needs for analytical techniques.

Brief Description

This article is based on modeling studies conducted in response to requests from Yale University, the Yale New Haven Hospital, and the State of Connecticut during the early weeks of the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak. Much of this work relied on scratch modeling, that is, models created from scratch in real time. Applications included recommending event crowd-size restrictions, hospital surge planning, timing decisions (when to stop and possibly restart university activities), and scenario analyses to assess the impacts of alternative interventions, among other problems. This paper documents the problems faced, models developed, and advice offered during real-time response to the COVID-19 crisis at the local level.

Brief Description

Using a unique set of mobile device data and a difference-in-differences model, we find the stay-at-home orders increased the number of residents staying at home by 2.832 percentage points (or 11.25%). We also find these orders are less effective for counties with more vulnerable populations. By analyzing the number of work and nonwork trips, we find the percentage of vulnerable populations in a county negatively correlates with the reduction in the number of work trips but does not correlate with the reduction in the number of nonwork trips. Our results suggest vulnerable populations are less likely to follow the orders because their jobs prevent them from working from home.

Brief Description

The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic draws tremendous attention on disease transmission and public hygiene. This work focuses on the hotel housekeeping process. In a field study, a possible channel of disease transmission between consecutive guests in hotel rooms is revealed. In order to prevent the transmission, an innovative assembly-line housekeeping method is developed. The innovative design can help to improve hygienic standards as well as labor efficiency and service quality (error rate). The principle of the assembly-line method (i.e., eliminating contamination channels through teamwork operational design) can be applied to not only hotel housekeeping practices but also many other service settings. It leads to hygienic, efficient, and reliable operations, at no additional cost.

Brief Description

Using labor supply data from a large online education platform with over 100,000 gig workers, we show that online gig workers sharply increased their labor supply on the platform by 23% from the announcement of national emergency to the end of April; the increase became smaller in May and June, and disappeared in July and August. Further analyses indicate that unemployment and non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) rather than the risk of contracting COVID-19 can better explain why online gig workers increase their labor supply. We also investigate how online gig workers change their quality of work during the pandemic.

Brief Description

While physical distancing is an important public health intervention during COVID-19, it dramatically reduces classroom capacity. This sudden scarcity in classroom space poses operational challenges for colleges that want to offer physically-distanced in-person learning. We demonstrate that strategically assigning courses to delivery modes (i.e., remote, in-person, or hybrid) and re-assigning classrooms to non-remote courses can make the most of the scarce classroom space available. Our analysis of Georgia Tech’s registration and classroom capacity data suggested that even when classroom capacity drops to 20-25%, our approach can offer 68% of the in-person instruction hours delivered during a normal academic term.

Brief Description

From an experimental setting, we find evidence that affective/emotional reactions under novel operating conditions or dramatic events in supply chains, such as the shocks emerging from the COVID-19 pandemic, can overwhelm cognitive processing capability of managers. Under these conditions, managers fail to recognize the full scope of the problem and update their decision models accordingly, resulting in ordering behaviors that generate supply chain instability. Further research is needed to understand the cognitive-affective drivers of ordering behavior during disruptions.

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