In this talk, I first summarize experiences based on my role as a member of the COVID-19 Science Panel which was appointed by the Prime Minister’s Office in Finland to provide science-based support for managing the pandemic. Second, I discuss uses of scenario analysis in setting the stage for strategic decisions, noting that it can be beneficial to employ quantitative approaches to build scenarios that are diverse and comprehensive. Third, I present advances in solving influence diagrams for problems in which the usual ‘no-forgetting’ assumption does not hold or in which cross-cutting logical, resource and risk constraints must be accounted for. Such problems can be solved through Decision Programming (Salo et al., Eur J Oper Res 299:2, 2022) by building the equivalent mixed-integer linear programming formulation which can be solved through standard solvers.
