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Academic Campuses, Super Spreader Events & Pandemics: Simulation Evidence from Reopening Indian Universities with COVID-19

2020; RELX Group (Netherlands); Linguagem: Inglês

10.2139/ssrn.3660977

1556-5068

Chirantan Chatterjee, Aditya Bansal,

COVID-19 epidemiological studies

What would happen if Indian universities and colleges decided to reopen for the Fall semester in August 2020 amidst rising national prevalence of COVID-19? Are they potential tinder boxes for India's next super spreader events? We provide evidence on this question using a simulation study on a stylized campus in India, which we call IIMX. IIMX in our setting is a residential campus, houses 1700 people (students, faculty and staff, resident and contractual). Our method involves simulating SEIDR [1] models used in recent epidemiological work to understand the consequences of reopening with simulated findings over the next 5 months or 20 weeks. We find that with an R0 value of 3 and only 10 students infected when the college begins, 1392 students (81.88%) will be infected along with 14 casualties by the end of Week 20. Within the first 10 weeks itself, 1321 (77.70%) students are expected to be infected along with 12 casualties. With the disease expected to spread even more quickly in a closed setting like that of academic campuses due to social interactions (coming from shared dorms, canteens and classes, and with students coming in from across the country) these estimates of ours are probably a lower bound of the true consequences. Also, with evidence increasing on reinfections, reopening university campuses in India could be its next challenge in the battle against COVID-19. We conclude recommending that without a safe, efficacious vaccine deployed in the next few months, organizational leaders in Indian academic campuses and policy makers should go fully virtual for the entire academic year like what has been done in IIT Bombay in India.