Containing the Spread of Infectious Disease on College Campuses

Shah, M.; Ferra, G.; Fitzgerald, S.; Barreira, P.; Sabeti, P.; Colubri, A.

College campuses in the United States are highly vulnerable to infectious diseases outbreaks, and there is a mounting need to develop strategies that best mitigate their size and duration, particularly as colleges consider reopening their campuses in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. Towards addressing this need, we applied a stochastic transmission model to quantify the impact of university-level responses to past outbreaks on their campuses and used it to determine which control interventions are most effective. The 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 universities should design more aggressive diagnostic procedures and stricter isolation policies to decrease infectious disease incidence on campus. Our model can be applied to data from other outbreaks in college campuses and similar small-population settings.