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Optimizing COVID-19 testing strategies on college campuses: evaluation of the health and economic costs (preprint)
medrxiv; 2022.
Preprint in English | medRxiv | ID: ppzbmed-10.1101.2022.12.04.22283074
ABSTRACT
Colleges and universities in the US struggled to provide safe in-person education throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. Testing coupled with isolation is a nimble intervention strategy that can be tailored to mitigate health and economic costs, as the virus and our arsenal of medical countermeasures continue to evolve. We developed a decision-support tool to aid in the design of university-based testing strategies using a mathematical model of SARS-CoV-2 transmission. Applying this framework to a large public university reopening in the fall of 2021 with a 60% student vaccination rate, we find that the optimal strategy, in terms of health and economic costs, is twice weekly antigen testing of all students. This strategy provides a 95% guarantee that, throughout the fall semester, case counts would not exceed the CDCs original high transmission threshold of 100 cases per 100k persons over 7 days. As the virus and our medical armament continue to evolve, testing will remain a flexible tool for managing risks and keeping campuses open. We have implemented this model as an online tool to facilitate the design of testing strategies that adjust for COVID-19 conditions, university-specific parameters, and institutional goals.
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Full text: Available Collection: Preprints Database: medRxiv Main subject: COVID-19 Language: English Year: 2022 Document Type: Preprint

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Full text: Available Collection: Preprints Database: medRxiv Main subject: COVID-19 Language: English Year: 2022 Document Type: Preprint