Cator Durward, Huang Qimin, Mondal Anirban, Ndeffo-Mbah Martial, Gurarie David
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Texas A & M University, College Station, TX 77840, USA.
Department of Mathematics, Applied Mathematics, and Statistics, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH 44106, USA.
Math Biosci Eng. 2022 Sep 20;19(12):13861-13877. doi: 10.3934/mbe.2022646.
The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has created major public health and socio-economic challenges across the United States. Among them are challenges to the educational system where college administrators are struggling with the questions of how to mitigate the risk and spread of diseases on their college campus. To help address this challenge, we developed a flexible computational framework to model the spread and control of COVID-19 on a residential college campus. The modeling framework accounts for heterogeneity in social interactions, activities, environmental and behavioral risk factors, disease progression, and control interventions. The contribution of mitigation strategies to disease transmission was explored without and with interventions such as vaccination, quarantine of symptomatic cases, and testing. We show that even with high vaccination coverage (90%) college campuses may still experience sizable outbreaks. The size of the outbreaks varies with the underlying environmental and socio-behavioral risk factors. Complementing vaccination with quarantine and mass testing was shown to be paramount for preventing or mitigating outbreaks. Though our quantitative results are likely provisional on our model assumptions, sensitivity analysis confirms the robustness of their qualitative nature.
持续的新冠疫情给美国带来了重大的公共卫生和社会经济挑战。其中包括教育系统面临的挑战，高校管理人员正在努力应对如何降低校园内疾病风险和传播的问题。为帮助应对这一挑战，我们开发了一个灵活的计算框架，用于模拟新冠病毒在寄宿制大学校园中的传播和控制情况。该建模框架考虑了社会互动、活动、环境和行为风险因素、疾病进展以及控制干预措施中的异质性。在不采取干预措施以及采取诸如疫苗接种、对有症状病例进行隔离和检测等干预措施的情况下，探讨了缓解策略对疾病传播的影响。我们表明，即使疫苗接种覆盖率很高（90%），大学校园仍可能经历大规模疫情爆发。疫情爆发的规模因潜在的环境和社会行为风险因素而异。事实证明，将疫苗接种与隔离和大规模检测相结合对于预防或减轻疫情爆发至关重要。尽管我们的定量结果可能基于我们的模型假设而具有临时性，但敏感性分析证实了其定性性质的稳健性。
