When a pipe bursts in the basement, a plumber acts step by step: locates the leak, measures the pressure, determines the cause, patches it up, and checks if it's dry. The same recipe — the standard model DMAIC — is being proposed against epidemics.
First, they determine the scope — how many hospital beds are occupied, which industries are sagging. Then comes data collection: surveys, tests, statistics. Just as a plumber listens to the pipes and watches the drips, scientists track outbreaks. Markovian models predict the spread of infection before it's too late to reinforce weak points: move appointments online, redistribute doctors, boost the system's flexibility.
The finale is control: precise calculation of measures to slow the epidemic without unnecessary lockdowns. It's surprising that DMAIC was honed on Motorola's factory assembly lines — there it weeded out defects and saved billions. Now it's fixing not pipes, but society. An epidemic increases entropy, and a systems approach, much like the ideas of von Neumann in computing, restores structure.
Interestingly, the first tests of DMAIC in healthcare helped cut hospital queues in half — without extra funding.
In the movie 'Contagion' (2011), panic hinders the search for a vaccine; the DMAIC protocol, like a plumber's blueprint, would have brought clarity.