News Room

Rich Collins is trapped in the maze of coronavirus-related travel restrictions in the Northeast. The Rhode Island firefighter has custody of his 5-year-old daughter every other weekend in an agreement with his ex-wife, but he can't bring her to his home because she lives in upstate New York. “The problem is, if I bring my daughter to Rhode Island for her weekend here, then when she goes back to New York — due to Rhode Island being on New York's quarantine list — she can’t go to school. She has to quarantine for 14 days," said Collins, 36, of Warwick.

“High compliance with voluntary quarantine—where the entire household stays home if there is a person with symptoms or risk of exposure in the household—has a significant impact on reducing the spread,” says Pinar Keskinocak, professor in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering (ISyE) and director of the Center for Health and Humanitarian Systems at Georgia Institute of Technology.

Earlier this year, a team of Yale researchers showed that the concentration of COVID-19 RNA in sewage mirrors the spread of the disease through a population. In a new study, they find that testing sewage can serve as an early indicator of an outbreak relative to hospitalizations, and also use the data to assess the effectiveness of Connecticut’s stay-at-home order this spring.  

On June 8, a crowd of maskless college students gathered outside Harper’s Restaurant and Brewpub in East Lansing, Michigan. Like other bars and restaurants in the United States, Harper’s had closed when the state imposed a shelter-at-home order in March. When the bar was allowed to reopen in June, at 50 percent capacity, fewer people could enter, and more had to wait. So the inevitable happened. The Brits call it a queue. Americans call it a line.

Once again, it’s election season, and once again, the New York City Board of Elections is under fire. This disaster is as predictable as the phases of the moon. To be fair, the long lines for early voting at sites across the city, which stretch down and around blocks and in some cases take hours to get through, are the result of many factors, some of which can’t be predicted precisely. The biggest variable is the number of people who will show up to vote. Small changes in demand can result in large changes in waiting time.