I assume everyone is familiar with the concept of “going viral” and that you’re paying attention to the SARS-Cov-2 outbreak. So you understand the importance of social distancing. When it comes to conferences, they’re not quite what you’d call social distancing, are they?
Well then, Harvard’s Michael Baym puts 2 + 2 together in the way that physicists-turned-biologists seem able to to do with ease and elegance:
“The reason to cancel meetings and seminar visits is the same reason we have them in the first place: by establishing long-distance connections and high-connectivity nodes, we help ideas spread much faster through our social networks. It’s the same for a virus.”
Please see this post for more words of wisdom about pandemics. For suggestions to fellow scientists and lab teams on how to deal with this coronavirus outbreak, here are my thoughts.
Telliamed Revisited 