Comparing Efficacy of Secondary School Bell Schedules at Mitigating Infectious Diseases
Open Access
Author:
Sim, Julian
Area of Honors:
Statistics
Degree:
Bachelor of Science
Document Type:
Thesis
Thesis Supervisors:
David Hunter, Thesis Supervisor Matthew D Beckman, Thesis Honors Advisor
Keywords:
Statistics Infectious Disease Networks ERGM Epidemiology Graph Theory EpiModel
Abstract:
The increasing rate of epidemics and pandemics has posed a challenge for schools, particularly those which do not have the necessary resources to properly transition to online education. Although the educational benefits of different bell schedules have been studied, the purpose of this thesis is to consider whether these schedules have any effects on mitigating the spread of infectious disease. To conduct this study, we expanded on traditional compartmental models of infectious disease spread to utilize network structures via a modification of the EpiModel R package. This tool considers the effects of both friendship and classroom structure, in order to simulate real-world infectious disease spread. Utilizing an anonymized dataset based on secondary schools in the American Southwest as a means for modeling the friendship structure of a school, together with a systematic course schedule built to mimic real world counterparts, it was determined that minor difference exists between the scheduling systems, with block based schedules performing slightly worse than period based schedules for a toy example. However, each scheduling system has separate advantages which may be more applicable depending on selection of school and disease.