UMass Chan 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.

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 Preprints are preliminary reports of work that have not been certified by peer review.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.

Journal/Book/Conference Title

medRxiv

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.

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