University of Massachusetts Medical School Faculty Publications
UMMS Affiliation
Department of Microbiology and Physiological Systems
Publication Date
2020-12-31
Document Type
Article Preprint
Disciplines
Disease Modeling | Epidemiology | Higher Education | Infectious Disease | Statistics and Probability | Virus Diseases
Abstract
College campuses are highly vulnerable to infectious disease outbreaks, and there is a pressing need to develop better strategies to mitigate their size and duration, particularly as educational institutions around the world reopen to in-person instruction in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. Towards addressing this need, we applied a stochastic compartmental model to quantify the impact of university-level responses to past mumps outbreaks in college campuses and used it to determine which control interventions are most effective. Mumps is a very relevant disease in such settings, given its airborne mode of transmission, high infectivity, and recurrence of outbreaks despite availability of a vaccine. Our model aims to simultaneously overcome three crucial issues: stochastic variation in small populations, missing or unobserved case data, and changes in disease transmission rates post-intervention. We tested the model and assessed various interventions using data from the 2014 and 2016 mumps outbreaks at Ohio State University and Harvard University, respectively. Our results suggest that in order to decrease infectious disease incidence on their campuses, universities should apply diagnostic protocols that address false negatives from molecular tests, stricter quarantine policies, and effective awareness campaigns among their students and staff. Our model can be applied to data from other outbreaks in college campuses and similar small-population settings.
Keywords
Infectious disease, mumps outbreak, college campus, stochastic SEIR model, public health intervention, Harvard University, Ohio State University
Rights and Permissions
The copyright holder for this preprint is the author/funder, who has granted medRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under a CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license.
DOI of Published Version
10.1101/2020.07.31.20166348
Source
medRxiv 2020.07.31.20166348; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.07.31.20166348. Link to preprint on medRxiv.
Journal/Book/Conference Title
medRxiv
Repository Citation
Shah M, Ferra G, Fitzgerald S, Barreira PJ, Sabeti PC, Colubri A. (2020). Containing the Spread of Infectious Disease on College Campuses [preprint]. University of Massachusetts Medical School Faculty Publications. https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.07.31.20166348. Retrieved from https://escholarship.umassmed.edu/faculty_pubs/1878
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
Included in
Disease Modeling Commons, Epidemiology Commons, Higher Education Commons, Infectious Disease Commons, Statistics and Probability Commons, Virus Diseases Commons
Comments
This article is a preprint. Preprints are preliminary reports of work that have not been certified by peer review.
The PDF available for download is Version 4 of this preprint. The complete version history of this preprint is available at medRxiv.