Public Health Coronavirus Lockdown Hits Shanghai, Case Rates Fall With rapid spread of the COVID-19 Omicron variant, health authorities in China have imposed a city-wide lockdown on Shanghai. The plan is to conduct the lockdown in two stages over a nine-day period as the metropolis is home to more than 25 million people. Widespread testing is being deployed. As a major financial and commercial city, the closure of Shanghai poses potential short-term economic heartaches. Countrywide, the daily case count has fallen to a seven-day average of 9,403 cases and 167 related death this week. New cases are down by 49 percent in the past week. Clearly, the lockdown strategy has the ability to cut spread in the short-term, but larger questions remai...
Illuminating the value of technical research
On behalf of a commodity producer organization, WPI evaluated the outputs from a project that featured a $5 million investment into technical research over multiple years. WPI’s team captured the results of this extensive effort and synthesized them for presentation to the organization’s governing board; among the findings uncovered and presented for the first time was the development of genomic traits proven, via rigorous testing, to provide crop yield advantages of 50 percent or more to U.S. farmers in times of drought. Capturing measurable results from long-term efforts can be challenging. Educating clients on the dynamics of success measurement when quantifiable results are not readily available requires deep client-consultant collaboration and an ability to consider both near- and long-term client aspirations with market/policy dynamics – attributes that WPI brings to every consulting engagement.