News Room

Across the Midwest, the rollout of COVID vaccines has been spotty. Lots of people are having a trouble with online signups. And vaccine demand far exceeds supply. That’s made the process challenging, especially in rural areas. For years, the Girls State Training School in central Iowa has sat mostly empty. But on this day, the main building is buzzing as a local vaccination clinic opens. Rooms labeled for social workers, psychologists and others who once helped delinquent girls are filled with health care workers and elderly residents from the rural area. “It’s zooming today. We’ve noticed that despite our best efforts to say come at your scheduled time, people are coming 10, 15 minutes early,” says Shannon Zoffka, executive director of the Tama County Public Health Department.

Zoffka says the clinic scheduled 110 people for their first doses. They were selected from a waiting list her department started last month.

On a recent Saturday morning, Peggy Hoon got behind the wheel of her 2011 Toyota RAV4 and made the 300-mile round trip to Charlotte from her Raleigh home. After weeks of waiting on hold or hearing about COVID-19 vaccination events only after they'd filled up, the 65-year-old Wake County resident finally got a shot. She considers herself lucky and worries about equity issues that leave other seniors unable to find doses of the precious vaccine. State officials say the primary barrier to rolling out the vaccines has been a lack of supply. But the N.C. Watchdog Reporting Network found that in some cases, health workers are giving doses to people who do not yet qualify, according to guidelines from the N.C. Department of Health and Human Services.

On a recent Saturday morning, Peggy Hoon got behind the wheel of her 2011 Toyota RAV4 and made the 300-mile round trip to Charlotte from her Raleigh home. After weeks of waiting on hold or hearing about COVID-19 vaccination events only after they’d filled up, the 65-year-old Wake County resident finally got a shot. She considers herself lucky and worries about equity issues that leave other seniors unable to find doses of the precious vaccine. State officials say the primary barrier to rolling out the vaccines has been a lack of supply. But the N.C. Watchdog Reporting Network found that in some cases, health workers are giving doses to people who do not yet qualify, according to guidelines from the N.C. Department of Health and Human Services.

If achieving the intelligent enterprise were easy, everyone would have done it by now. The road to creating, or re-creating, a business optimized by AI to take advantage of machine-assisted decision-making at all levels of the organization is a long one. Two key questions are, how far along are we on the path toward achieving this vision of future productivity, and are there ways organizations can improve their odds of success? Companies are now directing billions of dollars globally each year toward AI development, yet more often than not, they’re frustrated by the lack of progress. In fact, only 1 in 10 managers who responded to a recent global survey conducted by MIT SMR and BCG could point to tangible returns. With AI investment expected to more than double to $110 billion by 2024, it’s not surprising that some leaders are asking whether that money would be better spent elsewhere in their organizations.

It wasn’t just Covid-19 itself, but the public response to it, which sent shockwaves through our food system and exposed its fragility. Short-term shortages, in the form of bare supermarket shelves, revealed that this highly complex food supply chain is not as resilient as it ought to be. All it took was fear of a toilet paper shortage — there was never a production problem — to turn paper products into the lockdown’s scarcest commodities. While the system adjusted to the strange new dynamic after a few weeks, it only took a small shock to empty the shelves of certain foods and other essentials. What happens if greater pressure were placed on the food supply chain by someone acting intentionally? Would we be able to cope with the result?