“Particularly if it’s a family member or a friend, there are also other things you might want to consider than just encouraging belief change,” said Briony Swire-Thompson, a postdoctoral researcher at Northeastern University’s Network Science Institute. “You might want to give the correction in a kind way, just because no one wants to be wrong.”

WGBH Morning Edition host Joe Mathieu spoke with Northeastern University law professor and WGBH News legal analyst Daniel Medwed about basic intellectual proprty law related to developing such a vaccine. 

Samuel Scarpino, an assistant professor at Northeastern University’s Network Science Institute, said Worobey’s paper “confirms what a lot of what we were starting to suspect from the epidemiological data, that there were some early introductions in the West Coast that did not spark sustained transmission.”

The bottom line: “Everything is sort of lining up in the direction that if we’re serious about it, we can control this thing,” Samuel Scarpino, an assistant professor at Northeastern University’s Network Science Institute, told STAT.

It’s a choice with consequences, experts say. Sam Scarpino, who heads the Emergent Epidemics Lab at Northeastern University, says even that brief, final delay came at a cost.

“Over 80 percent of [Massachusetts] hasn’t been infected yet,” said Samuel Scarpino, an epidemiologist at Northeastern University. “We’re going to be susceptible to another wave of infections.”

WGBH News legal analyst and Northeastern University law professor Daniel Medwed sees the couple’s legal agreement with federal prosecutors as “a plea discount.”

At an online forum Wednesday, Northeastern University President Joseph Aoun said his school would also conduct its own testing.

“If I don’t think the government is telling the truth about Covid-19, I’m going to ignore even the most strongly worded evacuation orders,” says Daniel Aldrich, director of the security and resilience studies program and a professor of political science, public policy, and urban affairs at Northeastern University. “And that might mean some people will […]

“It’s not going to be a snap-back V-shaped recovery, at least for Main Street,” said Alicia Sasser Modestino, an associate professor of public policy and economics at Northeastern University.

These inequities will likely widen. Even before the pandemic, inequalities in poverty and access to health care “were concentrated in southern parts of the country, and in states that are politically red,” says Tiffany Joseph, a sociologist at Northeastern University. Not coincidentally, she says, those same states have tended to take social-distancing measures less seriously […]

Northeastern has “the goal of a full reopening in the fall,” Aoun said. “But in order to do that it will not be business as usual.” He pointed to planning now underway to bring reduced density to every aspect of university life from classrooms to dormitories.