Since the beginning of the 2019-2020 COVID-19 pandemic, a great wealth of information has been made available to the general public as well as to human resources professionals. GBV has no particular expertise in epidemiology, the treatment of people affected by COVID-19, or the socioeconomic impact of the pandemic, and therefore refrains from adding to the noise component of what is now on offer.

Nevertheless, the editorial team here at GBV does a lot of reading these days. It turns out that amidst the noise there are also some signals and we are glad to share a selection of links to relevant and trustworthy resources, a list we intend to keep as short as possible.

Information is arranged in three broad categories: spread of the pandemic, medical response, and socioeconomic impact.

In addition, a number of global consulting firms are pumping out information and advice as fast as they can, so for those of you who like to drink from a fire-hose, we have added a fourth category, that has no name as of now. Needless to say, if you are looking for an unhealthy mix of biased, incorrect, unverified, breathless pseudo-information, Facebook and Twitter are the names of the game. But you knew that already.

Finally, a heartfelt Thank you! to all our colleagues and experts to whom we point below.

Check back here on a regular basis as we will update the page until at least until May 01, 2020. Most of the resources below are updated on a daily basis as well.

Spread of the pandemic and other key indicators

1. Covid-19 Growth Rates, Mark Handley, University College London. http://nrg.cs.ucl.ac.uk/mjh/covid19/

Updated daily at around 0300 (UTC). GBV comments: once time delays are taken into account, the similarity of the curves between countries is… eerie; and, the curve from China turns out to be S-shaped: it is not a runaway exponential.

2. World Health Organization (WHO) daily situation reports https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2019/situation-reports/

3. If you prefer maps over curves, check out the Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) at Johns Hopkins University (JHU) : https://gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#/bda7594740fd40299423467b48e9ecf6

Medical response

(forthcoming, no puns intended)

Socioeconomic impact

1. Interest Rates, EURO Yield Curve: https://www.ecb.europa.eu/stats/financial_markets_and_interest_rates/euro_area_yield_curves/html/index.en.html

2. Interest Rates, US Dollar Yield Curve: https://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/data-chart-center/interest-rates/Pages/TextView.aspx?data=yield (unfortunately no graph, only numbers that can be exported to a spreadsheet)

If and when the economy starts lacking cash (liquidity), it slows down. The signal is short-term interest rates shooting up. So, watch the yield curve, especially the 3-month to 2-years segment. The EUR and the USD curves are the ones to watch.

3. Travel and Immigration Restrictions – Fragomen https://www.fragomen.com/about/news/immigration-update-coronavirus including a link to a 75-page country-by-country report (PDF)

Consultants

• SHRM https://www.shrm.org/ResourcesAndTools/Pages/communicable-diseases.aspx
• Deloitte https://www2.deloitte.com/global/en/pages/about-deloitte/topics/combating-covid-19-with-resilience.html?icid=covid-19_article-nav
• KPMG https://home.kpmg/xx/en/home/misc/search.html?sp_p=any&q=covid
• PwC https://www.pwc.com/gx/en/issues/crisis-solutions.html and https://www.strategy-business.com/
• EY https://www.ey.com/en_gl/search?q=covid
• McKinsey https://www.mckinsey.com/search?q=covid

Opinion and Assorted Homespun “Facts”

• Facebook https://www.facebook.com/search/top/?q=covid-19
• Twitter https://twitter.com/search?q=%23COVID2019