Search

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted a need for better understanding of countries’ vulnerability and resilience to not only pandemics but also disasters, climate change, and other systemic shocks. A comprehensive characterization of vulnerability can inform efforts to improve infrastructure and guide disaster response in the future. In this paper, we propose a data-driven framework for studying countries’ vulnerability and resilience to incident disasters across multiple dimensions of society. To illustrate this methodology, we leverage the rich data landscape surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic to characterize observed resilience for several countries (USA, Brazil, India, Sweden, New Zealand, and Israel) as measured by pandemic impacts across a variety of social, economic, and political domains. We also assess how observed responses and outcomes (i.e., resilience) of the COVID-19 pandemic are associated with pre-pandemic characteristics or vulnerabilities, including (1) prior risk for adverse pandemic outcomes due to population density and age and (2) the systems in place prior to the pandemic that may impact the ability to respond to the crisis, including health infrastructure and economic capacity. Our work demonstrates the importance of viewing vulnerability and resilience in a multi-dimensional way, where a country’s resources and outcomes related to vulnerability and resilience can differ dramatically across economic, political, and social domains. This work also highlights key gaps in our current understanding about vulnerability and resilience and a need for data-driven, context-specific assessments of disaster vulnerability in the future.

For an understanding of the phenomena, the first condition is the introduction of adequate concepts; only with the help of the correct concepts can we really know what has been observed. When we enter a new field, very often new concepts are needed, and these new concepts usually come up in a rather unclear and undeveloped form. Later they are modified, sometimes they are almost completely abandoned and are replaced by better concepts which then, finally, are clear and well defined. Werner Heisenberg (1) Proteins execute and control essentially all functions in living organisms, and they do it elegantly and efficiently, with designs honed by billions of years of evolution. For each protein, we can ask how it performs its specific function. Because there are at least 100,000 different proteins, all important for life, the task to study, characterize, and understand all proteins will take a very long time. There may, however, be a complementary approach to the problem, namely to find general concepts, properties, and laws that characterize proteins and other biomolecules and that may lead to shortcuts in understanding newly discovered systems. The work of Reat and collaborators in this issue of the Proceedings (2) adds new information that bears on both aspects, the detailed function of a particular protein and insight into general concepts. Reat and coworkers study the dynamics of bacteriorhodopsin (BR) with neutron scattering and hydrogen-deuterium exchange. BR is a protein that converts light into energy by pumping protons across a membrane (3). It consists of seven closely packed, essentially parallel, α helices that tightly enclose a retinal. Light is absorbed by the retinal and, through conformational changes, transports a proton (p) from the cytosolic to the extracellular side of the membrane. This process cannot be static; the proton transport requires motions of the …