“We should start thinking how to repurpose industries and places and build labs to do testing. This is what we have to do. There is no other way,” says Alessandro Vespignani, director of the Network Science Institute at Northeastern.

Vespignani believes that wartime efforts will need to be in full effect in order to slow the spread of this virus. This means social distancing for a longer time, in order to slow the disease, and use that time to increase capacity in hospitals, therefore increasing capacity in testing. Vespignani says that the virus will likely resurge, and four weeks of social distancing then going back to normal is not going to cut it.

He says “we should start thinking how to repurpose industries and places and build labs to do testing. This is what we have to do. There is no other way.”

This article was originally published on News@Northeastern on March 24, 2020. Follow this link to read more