Cecilia Menjívar, a UCLA professor of sociology who is one of the faculty experts affiliated with the Latino Policy and Politics Initiative at UCLA Luskin, is a co-author of a recent opinion piece for CNN that contends that society would be better served by using the phrase “physical distancing” instead of “social distancing.” In the effort to combat the spread of COVID-19, “what health experts are really promoting are practices that temporarily increase our physical distance from one another in order to slow the spread of the virus. They are not recommending social disconnection, social exclusion or rampant individualism,” wrote Menjívar and co-authors Jacob G. Foster and Jennie E. Brand, who are also sociology faculty members at UCLA. “We must be physically distant now — our health depends on it. But we should redouble our efforts to be socially close. Our health depends on that, too.”