COVID-19 aerosol transmission simulation-based risk analysis for in-person learning
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Abstract
As educational institutions begin a school year following a year and a half of disruption from the COVID-19 pandemic, risk analysis can help to support decision-making for resuming in-person instructional operation by providing estimates of the relative risk reduction due to different interventions. In particular, a simulation-based risk analysis approach enables scenario evaluation and comparison to guide decision making and action prioritization under uncertainty. We develop a simulation model to characterize the risks and uncertainties associated with infections resulting from aerosol exposure in in-person classes. We demonstrate this approach by applying it to model a semester of courses in a real college with approximately 11,000 students embedded within a larger university. To have practical impact, risk cannot focus on only infections as the end point of interest, we estimate the risks of infection, hospitalizations, and deaths of students and faculty in the college. We incorporate uncertainties in disease transmission, the impact of policies such as masking and facility interventions, and variables outside of the college’s control such as population-level disease and immunity prevalence. We show in our example application that universal use of masks that block 40% of aerosols and the installation of near-ceiling, fan-mounted UVC systems both have the potential to lead to substantial risk reductions and that these effects can be modeled at the individual room level. These results exemplify how such simulation-based risk analysis can inform decision making and prioritization under great uncertainty.
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SciScore for 10.1101/2021.10.04.21263860: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
NIH rigor criteria are not applicable to paper type.Table 2: Resources
No key resources detected.
Results from OddPub: We did not detect open data. We also did not detect open code. Researchers are encouraged to share open data when possible (see Nature blog).
Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:Although UVC fans are potentially more effective than a mask mandate and the impact of UVC fans does not rely on the compliance of individual behavior as is the case with mask use, countervailing factors such as cost, time required for installation, and other facility level limitations may prohibit the installation of UVC fans in every …
SciScore for 10.1101/2021.10.04.21263860: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
NIH rigor criteria are not applicable to paper type.Table 2: Resources
No key resources detected.
Results from OddPub: We did not detect open data. We also did not detect open code. Researchers are encouraged to share open data when possible (see Nature blog).
Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:Although UVC fans are potentially more effective than a mask mandate and the impact of UVC fans does not rely on the compliance of individual behavior as is the case with mask use, countervailing factors such as cost, time required for installation, and other facility level limitations may prohibit the installation of UVC fans in every classroom. There does remain uncertainty about the rate of deactivation of virions from UVC fans, and this likely depends on specific configurations and rooms and requires careful engineering design. This simulation method could be used to show where fan installation would have the biggest impact on risk and account for relevant opportunity costs to optimize the use of such equipment, even quantifying how many UVC fans are required to meet the same expected risk as masking policies thus quantifying the cost of lifting a mask mandate without increasing risk. Of particular note, masking and UVC effectiveness are relatively insensitive to new variants or other novel aerosol viruses, unlike vaccines whose effectiveness is primarily restricted to the particular vectors for which they were developed. In high uncertainty scenarios, evaluating such interventions and policies must reflect a range of possibilities for variables outside of the decision makers’ control. The variability in vaccine adoption and effectiveness across geographies, ideologies, age groups, and virus variants in the U.S. impacts the effectiveness of the interventions over which th...
Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.
Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.
Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.
Results from rtransparent:- Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
- Thank you for including a funding statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
- No protocol registration statement was detected.
Results from scite Reference Check: We found no unreliable references.
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