Alexander DePaoli, a marketing professor at Northeastern University, warned against overthinking when choosing to whom and how much to donate. DePaoli, who researches the effects of emotion in consumer reasoning, said you’ll get the most happiness from donating to what matters to you.

Additionally, new research suggests that COVID-19 cases were spreading rapidly in the U.S. far earlier than was reported: researchers at Northeastern University estimate that on March 1, when New York confirmed its first case of coronavirus, more than 10,000 people in the state may already have been infected. 

“In these moments of uncertainty we all suddenly feel the need to police our own behavior, but also police other people’s behavior as well,” says Northeastern University health law professor Aziza Ahmed.

“This is in line with our projections,” says Kate Coronges, director of the Network Science Institute at Northeastern University.

“Between the second half of January and the first half of February,” there were likely enough infected people in Boston “to generate local transmission,” said Alessandro Vespignani, the principal investigator behind the Northeastern model.

 That distribution matters because, say, adding a fifth gun to an already armed household isn’t the same as exposing an entire family to a new and potentially deadly weapon, explained Matt Miller, a professor of health sciences and epidemiology at Northeastern University.

“You’ve got to make driving, you know, the worst option in order to change things,” says Joan Fitzgerald, professor of public policy and urban affairs at Boston’s Northeastern University.

“You’ve got to make driving, you know, the worst option in order to change things,” says Joan Fitzgerald, professor of public policy and urban affairs at Boston’s Northeastern University.

The pantyhose creates a snugger fit around the wearer’s face, sealing in the loose edges of the masks, said Loretta Fernandez, an assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering at Northeastern University and one of the study’s authors.

Preliminary results from a study by researchers at Northeastern University show that sewn fabric masks can in some cases approach the filtration efficiency of commercially produced masks.

The data sets and models that scientists and officials work with to try to track or predict the spread of COVID-19 are woefully incomplete or misunderstood, argues Scarpino, a physics professor at  Northeastern University in Boston.

Dr. Alessandro Vespignani is the director of the Network Science Institute at Northeastern University in Boston.