March 21, 2021.Reading time 31 minutes.
When the University of California at San Diego started planning out their campus reopening strategy last spring, a research team at the school enlisted Ravi Goyal to help determine the most crucial mitigation measures. Goyal is a statistician at the policy research organization Mathematica (no, not the software system). I spoke to Goyal this week about the challenges of modeling COVID-19, the patterns he saw at UC San Diego, and how this pandemic may impact the future of infectious disease modeling.
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February 28, 2021.Reading time 29 minutes.
In the COVID-19 Data Dispatch this week, I wanted to share some bonus material from my recent Science News story. One of my favorite interviews that I did for this feature was with Dr. Pardis Sabeti, a computational geneticist at the Broad Institute of Harvard University and MIT. The Broad Institute helped over 100 colleges and universities set up COVID-19 testing and student symptom monitoring, most of them in New England. When I talked to Dr. Sabeti, though, she mostly spoke about Colorado Mesa University—a small school in Grand Junction, Colorado that saw it as a moral imperative to bring all of their students back to campus this fall.
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December 20, 2020.Reading time 1 minute.
Rounding out the issue with a couple of updates on school data. Updates include: new cost estimates for school COVID-19 safety, a report advocating for mass testing, and a break for college data.
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October 11, 2020.Reading time 2 minutes.
Featured sources for Oct. 11 include mortality data, superspreading events, risk levels, and college campuses.
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September 6, 2020.Reading time 2 minutes.
Since last week’s issue, four more forms of official state reporting on COVID-19 in schools have come to my attention. Plus, national sources on reopening plans and college cases.
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August 30, 2020.Reading time 7 minutes.
Across the country—and despite the warnings of numerous faculty members and public health leaders—colleges are reopening. Freshmen are returning to campus eager to meet their classmates, and upperclassmen are returning eager to see friends after months in their hometowns. For this issue, I surveyed the COVID-19 dashboards of 50 higher education institutions across the country.
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