Controlling the spread of COVID-19 on college campuses

TL;DR

This paper uses mathematical models to evaluate strategies like single rooms and online classes to control COVID-19 spread on college campuses, aiming to inform safe reopening policies.

Contribution

It introduces specific modeling approaches to assess dorm and classroom strategies for reducing COVID-19 transmission on campuses.

Findings

Single dorm rooms significantly reduce virus spread.

Moving large classes online can prevent epidemic outbreaks.

The effectiveness depends on disease contagiousness.

Abstract

This research was done during the DOMath program at Duke University from May 18 to July 10, 2020. At the time, Duke and other universities across the country were wrestling with the question of how to safely welcome students back to campus in the Fall. Because of this, our project focused on using mathematical models to evaluate strategies to suppress the spread of the virus on campus, specifically in dorms and in classrooms. For dorms, we show that giving students single rooms rather than double rooms can substantially reduce virus spread. For classrooms, we show that moving classes with size above some cutoff online can make the basic reproduction number $R_0<1$, preventing a wide spread epidemic. The cutoff will depend on the contagiousness of the disease in classrooms.