3:30 pm Zoom
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Viral testing and the NFL fans: two stories about the pandemic
Peko Hosoi, MIT
Host: Young-Kee Kim
It has been an extraordinary year. The urgent need to find solutions in the midst of a global pandemic has motivated many members of the scientific community to seek out new collaborations and tackle new problems. In this talk I will describe two experiences from the past year in which I was able to apply my physics training in unusual ways.
The first begins with a collaboration in the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society at MIT in which we derive a framework to estimate the amount of random viral testing, follow-up contact tracing, and subsequent isolation of infectious individuals required to prevent outbreaks in different communities. This analysis, surprisingly, demonstrates that a community’s resiliance to disease outbreaks is independent of its underlying network structure. Our analytic predictions are compared to numerical simulations of a branching model and an individual (or agent) based model, both of which capture the stochastic heterogeneous nature of interactions within a community. This analysis led to a partnership with NIH's RADx (Rapid Acceleration of Diagnostics) initiative and the development of whentotest.org, a website that is now being used to inform policy in multiple states and organizations.
The second story explores the impact of opening NFL stadiums to fans during the pandemic. During the 2020-2021 season, each NFL team put forward their own plans and negotiated with the league, the relevant state, and their local community to determine whether they would be able to open the stadium to fans. Roughly 2/3rds of the stadiums opened at some point during the season. Fortuitously, this provides us with a set of randomized trials which can be analyzed to determine the impact of opening stadiums. Borrowing techniques from economics, we apply synthetic control methods to analyze covid case counts to determine whether opening stadiums has a detrimental, beneficial or neutral effect on the surrounding community.