How one biostatistics team modeled COVID-19 on campus

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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What makes a successful semester during COVID-19?

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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How are colleges and universities reporting COVID-19 data?

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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