BU’s COVID-19 Data Offers Lessons for Others

Boston University leaders and scientists have written a case study documenting the lengths it took, in fall 2020, to safely reopen a residential university in one of the country’s most bustling urban centers.

Published in the June 25, 2021, edition of the peer-reviewed journal JAMA Network Open, the case study serves as a potential road map for other institutions and corporations, weary of remote functioning, that seek a path to bring people back together in person.

Almost as soon as BU drastically reduced campus operations in March 2020, University leadership began building coronavirus response teams—educators, scientists, engineers, clinicians, and laboratory technicians. Based on computer modeling of how the virus could spread on campus and the impact of intervention strategies, they put a reopening plan into action, which included an integrated digital medical record and appointment system, its own clinical testing lab capable of screening thousands of nasal-swab tests per day, a team of trained contact tracers, and designated quarantine and isolation housing.

Davidson Hamer, a faculty member at BU’s Schools of Public Health and Medicine and at the National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratories, was the lead author on the study.

“I’m an epidemiologist and Eric is a mathematician—we’d never even met before the pandemic hit,” Hamer says, referring to Eric Kolaczyk, a statistician and the director of BU’s Rafik B. Hariri Institute for Computing and Computational Science & Engineering, who coordinated the team that developed and maintains operation of BU’s computer simulation of its campuses and community. Kolaczyk points out that while BU was uniquely challenged given its size and location, by the same token it was singularly equipped with a deep and diverse set of experts.

Hamer agrees. “BU’s infrastructure played an important role in this—for leadership to buy into a reopening plan, for BU to have the right financial resources, and, most importantly, for BU’s intellectual resources to bring together the right expertise.”