Eric Kolaczyk offers a point of view on COVID-19 modeling in The Brink

Over the past a few months, universities have been trying their best to provide a normal experience for students in light of a global pandemic. Eric Kolaczyk, the Director of the Hariri Institute, has been working alongside researchers on campus to develop mathematical and computational model of BU’s campus to guide the University’s reopening plan and be used as a tool to identify any future signs of uncontrolled COVID-19 spread. Eric shared his point of view with the Brink.

Eric explains that this process as “a task simultaneously exhausting and invigorating, inspiring and humbling. It has also been just plain sobering.”

According to this computational model, there is a reasonable path forward for reopening BU this fall while containing COVID-19 infections at levels comparable to the rest of the Greater Boston area.

While the model could deviate based on the choices made by the students and staff, it is based on three primary assumptions:

1. The kind of contact people have to each other
2. How COVID-19 grows through these contacts
3. The interventions deployed to control the growth of the virus

According to Eric, the first and third assumptions are highly dependent on behaviour and actions.