“Density is still a very fraught subject in the US,” says Sara Jensen Carr, an architecture professor at Northeastern University in Boston and author of the forthcoming book, The Topography of Wellness: Health and the American Urban Landscape.

“Everyone is stressed out and fearful for their own health,” says Northeastern University law professor Aziza Ahmed, an expert in health law. “We have to be sensitive to what other people have the capacity to do.”

But the White House has been notably hands-off when it comes to establishing any co-ordinated, centralised response, says Nada Sanders, professor of supply chain management at Northeastern University.

“The 5th Circuit used Jacobson in a very wooden way and without appreciating everything that has happened, doctrinally and constitutionally, in the 115 years since,” said Northeastern University law professor Wendy Parmet, who specializes in public health law. “They cherry-picked from Jacobson.”

Northeastern University is making a residence hall available to 135 Boston police officers and emergency medical technicians.

Mayor Martin J. Walsh announced Thursday that Boston University has made 75 beds available for employees of the Pine Street Inn, a homelessness shelter in the South End, while Northeastern University will have 135 rooms available to Boston first responders who need a place to stay and self-isolate when they’re not working.

Nada R. Sanders Distinguished Professor of Supply Chain Management, Northeastern University

James Alan Fox, a professor of criminology at Northeastern University in Boston, said traditional street crime such as robberies and attacks involving strangers appears to have dropped in the past month in many American cities. “If you want to reduce crime in the street, you take away the street,” Fox said. “That’s essentially what is […]

Psyche Loui, an assistant professor of neuroscience at Northeastern University, told me that the pandemic is bolstering her view that, in evolutionary terms, music’s role is for social connection and cohesion.

“When you don’t have enough information or you don’t have accurate information, the fear you’re feeling makes every threat seem much more likely,” said David DeSteno, a professor of psychology at Northeastern University in Boston.

That’s according to Wendy Parmet, director of the Center for Health Policy and Law at Northeastern University, who joined WBUR’s Morning Edition to discuss how our attitudes are shaping the response to the pandemic.  

“It was like a great forgetting took place,” Wendy Parmet, a public health law scholar at Northeastern University, told me. “As the memory of epidemics faded, individual rights became much more important than collective responsibility.”