{"doi":"10.1371/journal.pcbi.1011715","title":"Optimizing COVID-19 testing strategies on college campuses: Evaluation of the health and economic costs","abstract":"Colleges and universities in the US struggled to provide safe in-person education throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. Testing coupled with isolation is a nimble intervention strategy that can be tailored to mitigate the changing health and economic risks associated with SARS-CoV-2. We developed a decision-support tool to aid in the design of university-based screening strategies using a mathematical model of SARS-CoV-2 transmission. Applying this framework to a large public university reopening in the fall of 2021 with a 60% student vaccination rate, we find that the optimal strategy, in terms of health and economic costs, is twice weekly antigen testing of all students. This strategy provides a 95% guarantee that, throughout the fall semester, case counts would not exceed twice the CDC's original high transmission threshold of 100 cases per 100k persons over 7 days. As the virus and our medical armament continue to evolve, testing will remain a flexible tool for managing risks and keeping campuses open. We have implemented this model as an online tool to facilitate the design of testing strategies that adjust for COVID-19 conditions as well as campus-specific populations, resources, and priorities.","journal":"PLoS Computational Biology","year":2023,"id":366593,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":6,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9553,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2023-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":310720,"name":"Remy Pasco","orcid":"0000-0002-9321-6876","position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":550113,"name":"Spencer Woody","orcid":"0000-0002-2882-3450","position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":7697,"name":"Michael Lachmann","orcid":"0000-0002-1086-9717","position":3,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":813891,"name":"Maureen Johnson-León","orcid":null,"position":4,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":882470,"name":"Darlene Bhavnani","orcid":"0000-0002-4313-0089","position":5,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":795730,"name":"Jessica Klima","orcid":null,"position":6,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":226455,"name":"A. David Paltiel","orcid":"0000-0002-4861-3290","position":7,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":301431,"name":"Spencer J. Fox","orcid":"0000-0003-1969-3778","position":8,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":110263,"name":"Lauren Ancel Meyers","orcid":"0000-0002-5828-8874","position":9,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":559169,"name":"Kaitlyn E. Johnson","orcid":"0000-0001-8011-0012","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":19,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-19T01:14:59.372548Z","pmid":"38134223","pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}