Transportation After COVID-19, Deregulations to Watch, and More

May 2, 2020

North Capitol Street and the New York Avenue overpass is pictured during the coronavirus outbreak.

Coronavirus has shown us a world without traffic. Can we sustain it?

The COVID-19 lockdown has enabled the country to execute a transportation experiment at an almost unfathomable scale. Adie Tomer and Lara Fishbane say the results should give us hope that it’s possible to reduce congestion, deliver a safer and greener transportation system, and still bring the U.S. economy back to full capacity.

American workers’ safety net is broken. The COVID-19 crisis is a chance to fix it.

In many hard-hit states, the pandemic-induced recession has shredded programs for workers’ economic security and career advancement. John Austin argues that now is the time to permanently overhaul the nation’s woefully inadequate worker safety net system.

The Trump administration has undertaken a series of deregulatory measures to address various challenges during the coronavirus pandemic. From health privacy rules to EPA enforcement, Brookings experts highlight some of the most impactful COVID-related deregulations to date.

For more on the administration’s deregulatory agenda, see our newly-updated tracker.

TechStream from Brookings

This week we launched TechStream, a new online publication that brings technologists and policy experts together to address the tech challenges of tomorrow. This week’s contributors dove into some of the risks and opportunities of technology in the fight against the spread of COVID-19. Read highlights below or browse for more.

Content moderation in the COVID-19 era. To make up for the absence of human reviewers, social media platforms have largely handed off the role of moderating content to algorithmic systems. Marc Faddoul checks on how the experiment is going.

Using AI to design vaccines. As COVID-19 began to spread globally in late January, Ethan Fast and Binbin Chen used machine learning tools to search for immunogenic components of the virus that would make good vaccine candidates. In a new post, Fast and Chen share their findings and discuss what might come next.

How South Korea leveraged tech to fight COVID-19. South Korea has consistently ranked as one of the most connected countries in the world, with over 96% having daily internet access. Justin Fendos explains why this connectivity proved especially valuable during the COVID-19 crisis.

A note on the Brookings response to COVID-19:

The Brookings Institution campus in Washington, D.C. will be closed through at least June 1. For more information, read our full guidance here. As Brookings experts continue to assess the global impacts of COVID-19, read the latest analysis and policy recommendations at our coronavirus page or stay up to date with our coronavirus newsletter.

The conclusions and recommendations of any Brookings publication are solely those of its author(s), and do not reflect the views of the Institution, its management, or its other scholars.

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