Impact of Vaccination and Testing in an Urban Campus Model for the SARS-CoV-2 Pandemic

Abstract

The crisis induced by the Coronavirus pandemic severely impacted educational institutes. Even with vaccination efforts underway in 2021, it was not clear that sufficient confidence will be achieved for schools to reopen soon. This paper considers the impact of testing rates in addition to vaccination rates in order to reduce infections and hospitalizations and evaluates strategies that allow educational institute in urban settings to remain open. These strategies are also applicable to big campus style businesses and would help planning to keep the businesses open and help the economy. Our analysis is based on a graph model where nodes represent population groups and edges represent population exchanges due to commuting populations. The commuting population is associated with edges and is associated with one of the end nodes of the edge during part of the time period and with the other node during the remainder of the time period. The progression of the disease at each node is determined via compartment models, that include vaccination rates and testing to place infected people in quarantine along with consideration of asymptomatic and symptomatic populations. Applying this to a university population in Chicago with a substantial commuter population, chosen to be 80% of the school's population as an illustration, provides an analysis which specifies benefits of testing and vaccination strategies over a time period of 150 days.