David Lazer ran into a fellow Northeastern University professor Alessandro Vespignani. It was February 2020. One month before the COVID-19 shutdowns.
“I said, ‘Tell me: How bad is it going to be?’” says Lazer, University Distinguished Professor of Political Science and Computer Sciences at Northeastern. “And he laid out how bad it would be.”
They were facing a life-changing event, warned Vespignani, director of the Network Science Institute and Sternberg Family Distinguished Professor at Northeastern. SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, was spreading fast throughout the U.S. and beyond just three months after its emergence in Wuhan, China.
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Photo by Matthew Modoono/Northeastern University
