Modelling by Northeastern University in Boston suggests that if 50 rich countries receive the first 2bn doses of a vaccine that is 80% effective, it will prevent 33% of deaths from covid-19, whereas if the vaccine is distributed according to countries’ population, the share of those saved almost doubles.

Nada Sanders, a professor of supply-chain management at Northeastern University, says the availability of a vaccine will not lead immediately to vaccinations, because so much else needs to be organised. 

Northeastern University law professor Leo Beletsky said this report is more evidence that federal authorities should remove barriers to opening SCSs, especially amid concerns about rising overdose deaths during the pandemic.

“We’ll probably figure out how to solve, in the short term, the cold chain, just because the estimates of the economic costs I’ve seen in the US are in the trillions of dollars. Longer term, in the US and globally, something that has to be at minus 70 is almost a nonstarter,” says Sam Scarpino, […]

The reality, said Alan Clayton-Matthews, a professor of economics and public policy at Northeastern University, is that businesses won’t really bounce back until the virus gets knocked down, and that could be an argument to take another hit, hopefully for just a few weeks, and shut down more fully.

“I don’t think the United States ever had multiple waves,” said Alessandro Vespignani, professor of physics, computer science, and health science at Northeastern University in Boston who models the pandemic’s impact. “We are leading the same wave that is moving across the country.”

“We shouldn’t be evicting people during a pandemic,” said Sam Scarpino, an epidemiologist at Northeastern University. “From an epidemiological perspective, households are high risk for transmission.”

When Hongli Zhu, an assistant professor at Northeastern University and co-author of a paper that lays out the new material in the journal Matter, first came to the U.S. in 2007, she says she was surprised at the amount of single-use containers in stores, at restaurants, and in the trash cans at her seminars. “If you […]

But Zhu Hongli, a mechanical engineer at Northeastern University in Boston, thinks it can be put to better use. As she and her colleagues describe in Matter this week, with a bit of tweaking bagasse makes an excellent—and biodegradable—replacement for the plastic used for disposable food containers such as coffee cups.