Newly funded: Informing social distancing measures for COVID-19

Meggan Craft, PhD, associate professor in the Department of Veterinary Population Medicine is collaborating with Eva Enns, PhD, associate professor in the Division of Health Policy and Management in the School of Public Health, to create a model of how the novel coronavirus moves through an individual’s network. This study, funded by the UMN Rapid Response Grant program, aims to help decision-makers anticipate relaxing household isolation while minimizing transmission rebound, mitigating consequent deaths. The scientists will work with decision-makers to leverage insights from the team’s network science to develop clear visualizations of different social distancing scenarios that illustrate which household-to-household interactions best decrease the rate of COVID-19 spread. The goal is to develop a network model to simulate the spread of COVID-19 virus through communities and to test the effectiveness of relaxing social distancing control strategies under different scenarios. Results from this project would provide guidance to decision-makers regarding the timing, implementation, and communication of reducing social distancing measures. This research team's long-developed, tried-and-true methods have allowed them to successfully model countless viruses in both animal and human population networks, including the swine flu, retroviruses in pumas and lions, and raccoon rabies.