COVID-19 Response

School Closures and Childcare Needs

• Vox (4/16/20)

COVID-19 in Wildfire Camps

• Boone, Associated Press (5/13/20)

• Investigate West (5/16/20)

• Colorado Edition KUNC, NPR (8/25/20)

• Colorado Edition KUNC NPR (11/10/20)

Colorado Mobility Report

• Colorado Public Radio (1/5/22)

• 9 News (Denver) (11/15/21)

• Washington Post (11/10/21)

• Denver 7 News (5/15/20)

• Colorado Sun (6/22/20)

• Colorado Sun (12/2/20)

• Colorado Public Radio (1/19/21)

• Colorado Public Radio (3/15/21)

Point/Counterpoint on the merits of public health restrictions (with Jonathan Samet, 1/3/21)

In April of 2020, I joined the Colorado COVID-19 Modeling Team contracted by the Colorado Department of Public Health and the Environment (CDPHE) to develop a maintain an epidemiological simulation model to provide situational awareness and inform policy. The COVID-19 pandemic was the first instance in recent history that the country and world relied on non-pharmaceutical interventions. From the beginning of the pandemic, I began working with mobile device data with the

• Weekly briefings with the Governor of Colorado, Jared Polis, and the leadership of CDPHE

• Regularly draft reports on the current state of the pandemic and scenario projections. Find the reports here.

• Maintain a publicly accessible website visualizing economic and mobility data for all counties in Colorado.

• In addition to public-facing reports and documents, the team conducts targeted analyses of sensitive data to answer specific questions from the Governor's office and CDPHE leadership.

Collaborators: Jonathan Samet (Dean, CSPH), Elizabeth Carlton (CSPH), Andrea Buchwald (CSPH), Debashis Ghosh (CSPH), David Bortz (CU, Boulder), Katie Colborn (CU, Boulder), jimi adams (CU, Denver)

In the summer of 2020, I was asked to provide expertise and analytics to Colorado State University as it prepared to re-open for the Fall Semester. Collaborators and I organized a multidisciplinary team of faculty and graduate students to analyze incoming data, model SARS-CoV-2 transmission on campus, and advise on response activities. Our data analysis and modeling simulations informed several key decisions throughout the semester. We forecasted the number of active infections arriving on campus at the start of the semester using COVID-19 prevalence estimates in student's home county. We also developed an agent-based model simulation to forecast quarantine needs over the course of the semester.

Our work led to several research projects that we are developing for submission to academic outlets:

• Fout, A., Bayham, J., Gutilla, M. J., Fosdick, B. K., Pidcoke, H., Kirby, M., ... & Anderson, C. 2021. Estimating COVID-19 Cases on University Campuses Prior To Semester.

• Fout, A., Bayham, J., Gutilla, M. J., Fosdick, B. K. Using WiFi Data to Augment Public Health Response.

Collaborators: Bailey Fosdick (Statistics), Molly Gutilla (Public Health), Michael Kirby (Mathematics), Peter Jan van Leeuwen (Atmospheric Sciences), Chuck Anderson (Computer Science)

Once it became clear that the COVID-19 pandemic would last through at least one fire season, collaborators and I developed an epidemiological model to study how SARS-CoV-2 may spread in wildfire camps. We published a research article in Fire documenting the potential outcomes and the effects of interventions. We also wrote a brief version for the USFS. We then created an interactive dashboard where incident commanders and agency administrators could simulate disease spread within camps. We also created a risk assessment tool that incident commanders could use to evaluate the risk of disease spread on an incident.

Collaborators: Matthew Thompson (USFS), Erin Belval (USFS), Jake Dilliot (CSU)

Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, collaborators and I had been developing a framework for estimating the costs and benefits of school closures during a pandemic. One of the less obvious costs of school closure is the disruption to families that count on their child being in school for several hours of the day. Using detailed data from the US Current Population Survey, we estimated the potential childcare needs of the US workforce and highlight the relatively high needs of people in the healthcare sector. We published these findings and combine them with a simple model showing that under certain conditions, school closures could undermine public health goals if healthcare workforce absenteeism became sufficiently large (The Lancet Public Health).

We then produced an Interactive Dashboard of Potential Childcare Needs. This dashboard was cited in a letter from 22 U.S. Senators to Shannon Christian, Director of the Office of Child Care calling for policy that addresses childcare needs.

In the early stages of the pandemic, there were few national resources available for displaying data to inform decision-makers. We leveraged national datasets that contained information on COVID-19 risk factors by industry to develop a dashboard that highlights areas where COVID-19 outbreaks may lead to supply chain disruptions. Working paper:

Maher, S., Hill, A. E., Britton, P., Fenichel, E. P., Daszak, P., Zambrana-Torrelio, C., & Bayham, J. 2020. A COVID-19 Risk Assessment for the US Labor Force. medRxiv.