Dr. Richard Buckalew of UMD is a mathematics professor at UMD, so unless you're pretty math-savvy yourself, things can veer off into the weeds pretty quickly.
But in addition to providing some infographics to help you better understand the math behind social distancing, he's got a lot of interesting things to say about the big differences small changes can make, and how to evaluate the news and claims crowding your social media feeds these days.
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As a scientist, the furor over wearing face masks seems kind of strange to Sara Zimmer.
In her lab at the University of Minnesota Medical School, Duluth Campus, she spends a lot of time just preparing safety protocols for working with infectious materials and there's never any conflict over them.
But she points out a couple of things have changed since the early days of the pandemic: we wear masks in public now, not so much to keep ourselves safe, as to keep everyone safe. And that a lot of the push-back on masks may have nothing to do with the virus itself.