Epidemic threshold influenced by non-pharmaceutical interventions in residential university environments

Abstract

The control of highly contagious disease spreading in campus is a critical challenge. In residential universities, students attend classes according to curriculum schedule, and mainly pack into classrooms, dining halls and dorms. They move from one place to another. To simulate such environments, we propose an agent-based susceptible-infected-recovered model with time-varying heterogeneous contact networks. In close environments, keeping physical distancing is the mostly recommended and encouraged non-pharmaceutical intervention. It can be easily realized by using larger classroom, adopting staggered dining hours, decreasing the number of students per dorm and so on. Their real-world influence remains uncertain. With numerical simulations, we obtain epidemic thresholds. The effect of such countermeasures on reducing the number of disease cases is also quantitatively evaluated.