Colleges and universities are confronting a pressing question: How do they safely bring students back to campus amid a surging, world-wide pandemic? The decision involves careful consideration of a range of factors, from shared housing to testing capabilities to the likelihood of asymptomatic spread among students and staff. With death rates climbing to devastating levels and more contagious variants of the virus emerging, that choice has become even more consequential.
To help inform some of those decisions, a team of Harvard researchers that includes Gary King, the director of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science (IQSS), and Rochelle Walensky, the incoming director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, have launched a new disease-modeling app that simulates what different transmission and mitigation scenarios can look like in university settings.