Mumps at Harvard: Modeling the Spread of Disease on College Campuses

Abstract

With the recent surge of infectious disease outbreaks across college campuses in the United States, there is a mounting need to ascertain strategies that best mitigate an outbreak’s size and duration. Thus, this paper (i) creates a model to quantify the impact of university-level responses and (ii) determines which control interventions are most effective. The model is among the first in the field of epidemiology to overcome three crucial issues: stochastic variation in small populations, missing or unobserved case data, and changes in disease transmission rates post-intervention. To test the model and assess various interventions, we use data from the 2016 mumps outbreak at Harvard University. The results suggest that universities should design more aggressive diagnostic procedures and stricter isolation policies to decrease infectious disease incidence on campus.