Isolation and accompanying precautions for COVID-19 patients should be continued until they lose infectiousness. Longer isolation is ideal to avoid (falsely) ending isolation of infectious patients; however, (unnecessarily) prolonged isolation negatively impacts mental/physical health of those isolated patients. Better understanding on when to end isolation of COVID-19 patients is warranted.… Continue Reading Test-based guideline to end isolation of patients

In the midst of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, the Fall semester has completed at college campuses across the United States. To confront this crisis, universities have employed widely varying policies regarding instruction and infection testing. Armed with data on cases numbers and positivity rates, researchers now have the opportunity to… Continue Reading Modelling University Responses to COVID-19

Physical distancing measures, including school closures, have been enacted globally to reduce close contacts between infectious and susceptible individuals and mitigate the transmission of the Severe Acute Respiratory Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). The San Francisco Bay Area (California) was the first region in the United States to adopt physical distancing measures… Continue Reading Improving school-based models via contact surveys

As of Oct. 2020, there are more than 8,000 peer-reviewed and published transmission models on the current COVID-19 epidemic, based on recent search result in the NIH NCBI LitCovid online database. The predominant modeling approach is to construct a compartmental SEIR-type model, fit the published case series to the model,… Continue Reading Data Mining & Transfer Learning for Modeling COVID

This fall, SARS-CoV-2 hospitalizations in the United States have been growing rapidly, and in Colorado, where our team has been modeling the course of SARS-CoV-2 for state policy-makers, hospitalizations have now greatly exceeded the “first wave” of hospitalizations in the state. It is unclear to what extent this growth is… Continue Reading Using climate & mobility data to model SARS-CoV-2

The absence or a low level of testing for COVID-19 can cause a significant risk of being misled on the actual nature of outbreak, while a large-scale testing and quick testing turnaround are costly. There-fore, it is essential to understand how human Social Distancing (SD) behavior could aid in limiting… Continue Reading Optimizing COVID-19 Awareness and Testing Strategy

The severity, complexity and the global reach of COVID-19 present unprecedented challenges to public health practitioners. As the pandemic continues and the world grapples with the spread of SARS-COV-2 and the catastrophic health and economic impacts of COVID-19, it has become apparent that a “silver bullet” solution is unrealistic. Human… Continue Reading Agent-based modelling for COVID19 in South America