Related papers: Quantifying protocols for safe school activities

At a national-level, we sought to investigate the effect of public masking mandates on COVID-19 in Fall 2020. Specifically, we aimed to evaluate how the relative growth of COVID-19 cases and deaths would have differed if all states had…

Face masks have been widely used as a protective measure against COVID-19. However, pre-pandemic empirical studies have produced mixed statistical results on the effectiveness of masks against respiratory viruses. The implications of the…

We develop an agent-based model on a network meant to capture features unique to COVID-19 spread through a small residential college. We find that a safe reopening requires strong policy from administrators combined with cautious behavior…

COVID-19, a global pandemic of unprecedented scale, has had a profound impact on nations worldwide, resulting in the tragic loss of nearly 1.1 million lives in the United States and a staggering 7 million worldwide. In the absence of…

Returning universities to full on-campus operations while the COVID-19 pandemic is ongoing has been a controversial discussion in many countries. The risk of large outbreaks in dense course settings is contrasted by the benefits of…

By the end of 2020, a year since the first cases of infection by the Covid-19 virus have been reported, there is a light at the end of the tunnel. Several pharmaceutical companies made significant progress in developing effective vaccines…

The COVID-19 pandemic has plagued the world for months. The U.S. has taken measures to counter it. On a daily basis, newly confirmed cases have been reported. In the early days, these numbers showed an increasing trend. Recently, the…

In order to contain the COVID-19 pandemic, countries around the world have introduced social distancing guidelines as public health interventions to reduce the spread of the disease. However, monitoring the efficacy of these guidelines at a…

Few African countries have reported COVID-19 case numbers above $1\,000$ as of April 18, 2020, with South Africa reporting $3\,034$ cases being hit hardest in Sub-Saharan Africa. Several African countries, especially South Africa, have…

Statistical physicists have long studied systems where the variable of interest spans many orders of magnitude, the classic example is the relaxation times of glassy materials, which are often found to follow power laws. A power-law…

High air pollution levels are associated with school absences. However, low level pollution impact on individual school absences are under-studied. We modelled PM2.5 and ozone concentrations at 36 schools from July 2015 to June 2018 using…

By the end of May 2020, all states in the US have eased their COVID-19 mitigation measures. Different states adopted markedly different policies and timing for reopening. An important question remains in how the relaxation of mitigation…

The COVID-19 vaccine development, manufacturing, transportation, and administration proved an extreme logistics operation of global magnitude. Global vaccination levels, however, remain a key concern in preventing the emergence of new…

Protecting interventions of many types (both pharmaceutical and non-pharmaceutical) can be deployed against the spreading of a communicable disease, as the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic has dramatically shown. Here we investigate in detail…

Wearing masks is a useful protection method against COVID-19, which has caused widespread economic and social impact worldwide. Across the globe, governments have put mandates for the use of face masks, which have received both positive and…

The paper discusses how robots enable occupant-safe continuous protection for students when schools reopen. Conventionally, fixed air filters are not used as a key pandemic prevention method for public indoor spaces because they are unable…

We propose a simple rule of thumb for countries which have embarked on a vaccination campaign while still facing the need to keep non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPI) in place because of the ongoing spread of SARS-CoV-2. If the aim is to…

The debate on the role of school closures as a mitigation strategy against the spread of Covid-19 is gaining relevance due to emerging variants in Europe. According to WHO, decisions on schools "should be guided by a risk-based approach".…

The novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, and the disease it causes, COVID-19 was declared a pandemic on March 11, 2020 by the World Health Organization. Since then, the disease has spread all over the world, with the United States becoming the…

Vaccination against the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is a key measure to reduce the probability of getting infected with the disease. Accordingly, this might significantly change an individuals perception and decision-making in daily…