No abstract

Over the past two decades, the world has witnessed the onset of three different coronaviruses: severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV), Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV) and the current severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). Each of these has resulted in features that have made it in some ways stronger than the previous one. Predictive epidemic models are widely recognised as one of the most reliable and valuable tools to help policymakers take decisions regarding the management of sanitary crises and have been helping governments by calculating potential consequences and benefits of related containment measures. A comparison of epidemic models that were elaborated on SARS-CoV, which caused severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), and on SARS-CoV-2, which is currently causing coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) will lead to an overview of the potential reasons why the current one has led the world into an ongoing pandemic, while the other two remained relatively delimited.

Abstract.Today it is customary to speak of the collaborative potential of culture and business to achieve benefits in both cultural and business life. Making sense of the involvement of firms in culture, however, requires a better understanding of the link between cultural practices and projects and the development of business models.The aim of this paper is to focus on those companies that put culture at the core of their offering, with particular reference to those that can be defined as culture-based products. For these kinds of products, the creation, preservation, enhancement and transmission of a specific culture play a vital role of embedding a particular aesthetic and symbolic content in the cultural and consumption experience they offer. In order to explore the integration of cultural and commercial strategies that culture-based products seem to drive, we propose a framework of analysis, followed by an early comparative study through the investigation of a set of brands competing in the same field.