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Estimating COVID-19 Cases on University Campuses Prior To Semester

Fout, A.; Bayham, J.; Gutilla, M. J.; Fosdick, B. K.; Pidcoke, H.; Kirby, M.; van Leeuwen, P. J.; Anderson, C.

2021-01-26 epidemiology
10.1101/2021.01.22.21250120 medRxiv
Show abstract

For many institutions of higher learning, the beginning of each semester is marked by a significant migration of young adults into the area. In the midst of the COVID19 pandemic, this presents an opportunity for active cases to be introduced into a community. Prior to the Fall 2020 semester, Colorado State University researchers combined student home locations with recent case counts compiled by the New York Times to assign a probability to each individual of arriving with COVID19. These probabilities were combined to estimate that there would be 7.8 new cases among the on-campus population. Comprehensive testing of arriving students revealed 7 new cases, which validated the approach. The procedure was repeated to explore what could happen if students had returned to campus after Fall break. The estimate of 48 cases corroborated the Universitys early decision to transition to fully remote learning after break.

Matching journals

The top 7 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.

50% of probability mass above

"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.