Simulating COVID-19 in a university environment
Simulating COVID-19 in a university environment
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DOI：
10.1016/j.mbs.2020.108436
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发表时间：
2020-10-01
影响因子：
4.3
通讯作者：
Peck, Jennifer R.
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Gressman, Philip T.;Peck, Jennifer R.
在新冠疫情期间，住宿型学院和大学在提供面授教学方面面临着独特的挑战。管理人员目前面临着关于在疫情期间是否开放以及可能需要对其正常运营进行哪些调整以保护学生、教职员工的决策。然而，关于哪些措施可能最有效以及现有的干预措施是否能够控制校园内疫情的传播，信息却很少。我们开发了一个全面的基于随机主体的模型，以确定在疫情期间面授教学是否能够安全地继续，并评估各种干预措施的必要性。模拟结果表明，大规模随机检测、接触者追踪和隔离是控制校园疫情爆发的成功策略的重要组成部分。高检测特异性对于使隔离人群的规模可控至关重要。将最大型的课程转移到线上对于控制疫情爆发的规模和隔离学生的数量也至关重要。住宿暴露的增加会显著影响疫情爆发的规模，但控制学生之间非住宿的社交暴露可能更为重要。最后，即使在可控的疫情爆发情况下，必要的高隔离率也意味着大量的缺勤，这表明需要为被隔离学生的远程教学制定计划。
Residential colleges and universities face unique challenges in providing in-person instruction during the COVID-19 pandemic. Administrators are currently faced with decisions about whether to open during the pandemic and what modifications of their normal operations might be necessary to protect students, faculty and staff. There is little information, however, on what measures are likely to be most effective and whether existing interventions could contain the spread of an outbreak on campus. We develop a full-scale stochastic agent-based model to determine whether in-person instruction could safely continue during the pandemic and evaluate the necessity of various interventions. Simulation results indicate that large scale randomized testing, contact-tracing, and quarantining are important components of a successful strategy for containing campus outbreaks. High test specificity is critical for keeping the size of the quarantine population manageable. Moving the largest classes online is also crucial for controlling both the size of outbreaks and the number of students in quarantine. Increased residential exposure can significantly impact the size of an outbreak, but it is likely more important to control non-residential social exposure among students. Finally, necessarily high quarantine rates even in controlled outbreaks imply significant absenteeism, indicating a need to plan for remote instruction of quarantined students.