Quotes from Nicholas A. Christakis

My entire youth was spent with an incredibly ill parent... I don't think you can grow up that way and not be marked by that experience.

If we are connected to everyone else by six degrees and we can influence them up to three degrees, then one way to think about ourselves is that each of us can reach about halfway to everyone else on the planet.

We discovered that if your friend's friend's friend gained weight, you gained weight. We discovered that if your friend's friend's friend stopped smoking, you stopped smoking. And we discovered that if your friend's friend's friend became happy, you became happy.

At the core of all societies, I will show, is the social suite: (1) The capacity to have and recognize individual identity (2) Love for partners and offspring (3) Friendship (4) Social networks (5) Cooperation (6) Preference for one's own group (that is, "in-group bias") (7) Mild hierarchy (that is, relative egalitarianism) (8) Social learning and teaching

Plagues reshape our familiar social order, require us to disperse and live apart, wreck economies, replace trust with fear and suspicion, invite some to blame others for their predicament, embolden liars, and cause grief. But plagues also elicit kindness, cooperation, sacrifice, and ingenuity.

Because of our tendency to want what others want, and because of our inclination to see the choices of others as an efficient way to understand the world, our social networks can magnify what starts as an essentially random variation.

For a few years after we either reach herd immunity or have a widely distributed vaccine, people will still be recovering from the overall clinical, psychological, social, and economic shock of the pandemic and the adjustments it required, perhaps through 2024. I'll call this the intermediate pandemic period. Then, gradually, things will return to "normal"—albeit in a world with some persistent changes. Around 2024, the post-pandemic period will likely begin.

that routine childhood vaccinations might provide kids with cross-immunity against SARS-2. In particular, the tuberculosis vaccine BCG (not currently used in the United States) has received substantial attention due to its nonspecific protective role that could have an effect on novel viruses.36 Other

Unlike war or famine or natural disasters such as hurricanes or earthquakes during which people can gather together, an epidemic is a collective catastrophe that must be experienced separately.

even if masks reduced the transmission rate of the virus by only 10 percent, our models indicate that hundreds of thousands of deaths would be prevented around the world, creating trillions of dollars in economic value. This is a big effect of a small thing.

But a lie is halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes.

helping the public grasp during the early part of the epidemic what is likely to happen later is essential. But this is also one of the reasons it's so difficult to sound the alarm. If we say that many people will be sick and that our world will be changed "soon," people will look around and conclude that everything seems normal enough, so no interventions are necessary, thank you very much. And it seems normal the next day too, so the Cassandras are seen as merely alarmists.

Whereas cells in men have just a single, maternal X chromosome, cells in women have both a maternal and a paternal X chromosome. Female cells inactivate one of the two X chromosomes, resulting in a mosaic of cells with distinct combinations of gene variants. This variety could result in an immunity advantage compared to the more fixed expression in males.51

The first kibbutzim were founded in Palestine in 1910, and, by 2009, there were 267 kibbutzim scattered throughout modern Israel. These groups account for only 2.1 percent of the country's Jewish population but 40 percent of the national economic agricultural output and 7 percent of the industrial output.

Sadly, 12 percent of Americans listed no one with whom they could discuss important matters or spend free time.

Most human virtues, I would argue, are social virtues. To the extent that we care about love, justice, or kindness, we care about how people enact these virtues with respect to other people. No one is interested in whether you love yourself, whether you are just to yourself, or whether you are kind to yourself. People care about whether you show these qualities to others. And so friendship lays the foundation for morality.

Another risk is that if the wrong kind of immune response is elicited, the body might attack itself in what is known as an autoimmune reaction. This happened with the flu vaccine in 1976, when many patients developed a kind of paralysis (from which most people recovered) known as Guillain-Barré syndrome.

The United States also has fewer hospital beds per capita than other industrialized countries; the U.S. has 2.9 beds per 1,000 people, whereas South Korea has 11.5, Japan has 13.4, Italy has 3.4, Australia has 3.8, and China has 4.2.

The 1918 influenza pandemic famously had a W-shaped curve. The very young and the very old were at increased risk, but there was also elevated risk in the middle of the age distribution, spiking in patients around twenty-five years old. Scientists have been studying this for decades but are still unsure why it happened.

Charles Mackay argued that people "go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.

I have held the hands of countless dying people from all sorts of backgrounds, and I do not think I have met a single person who didn't share the exact same aspirations at the end of life: to make amends for mistakes, to be close to loved ones, to tell one's story to someone who will listen, and to die free of pain.

In early April 2020, many hospitals around the country were preparing policies related to triage that were based in part on age. Reports had emerged of the necessity of such triage in Italy in the previous month.42 Should circumstances require, the very old were to be denied ventilators or taken off them so that the ventilators might be reassigned to younger people more likely to survive.

The subjects were each placed in a functional MRI scanner and shown the same set of fourteen video clips (including a sentimental music video, a bit of slapstick comedy, a political debate), and the blood flow to various brain regions was individually measured as they viewed

The sense of incredible realism that many people experience when interacting in virtual worlds with virtual people is known as presence.