How Not to Behave In a Pandemic

We’re not really at our best right now.

1. The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, my alma mater, has developed an incredible, unprecedented Covid-19 testing program, one that has administered more than one million tests so far. (That’s more than 10 states.) It’s an incredible achievement, and it has allowed them to stay open, for in-person classes, while many other universities have been forced to shut down or offer only virtual classes. It’s an amazing system that has been deployed in efficient, intelligent fashion; at one point, they were responsible for roughly 2 percent of all tests in the entire country. I’m incredibly proud of my school.

Still, the University was unable to avoid an early outbreak, back in September, even though its test-and-alert system was able to isolate cases and warn those with the virus that they were infectious. Why did the outbreak still happen? A chemist at the U of I who worked on the testing system explained:

When we put the whole program in place, we did a bunch of modelling to try to understand how student…