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Assessing the changing dynamic between the demand that is placed on a community by cumulative exposure to hazards and the capacity of the community to mitigate or respond to that risk represents a central problem in estimating the community’s resilience to disaster. The authors present an initial effort to simulate the dynamic between increasing demand and decreasing capacity in an actual disaster response system to determine the fragility of the system, or the point at which the system fails. The results show that access to core information enhances efficiency of response actions and increases coordination throughout the network of responding organizations.

This essay examines basic functions of crisis decision‐making—cognition, communication, coordination, and control—in response to COVID‐19. This crisis decision‐making framework is applied to cases from South Korea, Italy, and the United States as public officials grapple with how to recognize, respond, and recover from this deadly, invisible threat. The authors acknowledge the harsh trade‐off between the compelling need to limit transmission of the virus to protect public health and the consequent economic losses of halting social interaction. They draw implications from this crisis for better decision‐making and investment in a global information infrastructure system to manage large‐scale, multidisciplinary threats to the health, economy, and sustainability of the world's community of nations. The essay concludes that collective cognition, amplified by timely, valid communication and supported by sound planning, trained personnel, appropriate technology, and bold leadership, enables coordinated action needed to bring a large‐scale global crisis under control. Evidence for Practice Invest in information technology to manage systematic data collection, analysis, and modeling. Provide timely, informed updates on community status to constituents. Maintain a knowledge base of resources, vulnerabilities, and plans.

We examined the Occupational Safety and Health Administration's (OSHA) inspections in the US to identify the effects of repeated inspections and the time between inspections on noncompliance. Our sample included 549,398 inspections conducted from 1972 through 2006 in manufacturing plants in the 29 states where federal OSHA enforces the law. We controlled for inspection type, industry, establishment size, and year. The number of total violations cited fell by 28%-48% from the first to the second inspection; after that, the numbers declined much more slowly. These effects were found in every one of the four sub-periods examined. The number of violations cited increased with each additional year since the prior inspection after controlling for other variables; however, the increases were small, totaling approximately 15% over five years. OSHA should probably give higher priority to first time inspections than to repeated inspections. The current requirement that at least two years elapse between planned inspections should probably be lengthened. important for OSHA and others concerned with workplace safety to learn about the effectiveness of the enforcement program and how to improve it. This is especially true because, over the years, OSHA (perhaps more than any other regulatory agency in the US) has been criticized for being both ineffective and meddlesome.In this article, we focus on how non-compliance with OSHA standards changes as an establishment undergoes repeated inspections and what the implications are for regulatory enforcement. Ideally, of course, the focus should be on the impact of these activities on the reduction of injuries and illnesses, not simply on compliance. In the language of program evaluation, citing violations is an "activity," abating hazards is an "output," but the desired outcome is the prevention of injuries, illnesses, and the resulting losses. We return to this topic in the Conclusion and Implication sections. For now, we simply note that there appears to be a positive, if weak, correlation between injuries per 100 workers and violations per 100 workers; and, more importantly, there is evidence that compliance with at least some standards does prevent injuries Haviland et al. 2010).The literature on regulatory enforcement draws on, among other things, the economic model of deterrence. In that model, the regulated actors make decisions based on the expected costs and benefits of compliance. Enforcement programs can increase the costs of non-compliance, where the expected cost is a function of the probability of detection and the penalty once detected. When the regulated actors are businesses, few doubt that economic incentives can influence behavior, although the magnitude of the impact that any given incentive will generate is usually unclear.Our focus in this article is on "specific deterrence," a term that refers to the effects on behavior of actually being inspected or subjected to sanctions for non-compliance. "General deterrence" refers to the impact on behavior of the perceived...