New Zealand, which had gone over 100 days without a single new case, shuts down parts of

Auckland after a cluster of cases emerge.

Cases in some of America's biggest hotspots, including Texas, Florida, and California,

are beginning to level off or decline.

And there will be no college football for the Big Ten or Pack 12 this year.

This is America Dissected.

I'm your host, Dr. Abdul Alseid, and I'm going to be missing Michigan football this year.

My first full-time job was as a scientist working in an epidemiology research group at the

University of Michigan.

My first research project focused on disparities in adverse birth outcomes, like premature birth

and infant mortality.

My first data set involved data about all the births in Michigan over five years, 617,451

total, if you're asking.

Every day for a month, I'd spend the better part of my day staring into huge data sets

with information about hundreds of thousands of people.

At first, I'd have to clean the data.

Painstakingly working through it to figure out how different hospitals had coded different

variables, identified missing data, and figure out how it might affect my findings.

Only after weeks of this cleaning could I get to the fun part, testing my hypotheses.

That meant mastering a statistical analysis program called SAS, short-for statistical

analysis system, and generating lines of code to command the computer to deliver analyses.

Now, this should come as no surprise, because by now you all know that I'm a serious nerd,

...