The COVID-19 pandemic has led to school closures across the globe and affected over 1.5 billion students.1 For Fall 2021, many schools plan to return to in-person learning even as variants of concern, such as Delta, are becoming dominant across the world. As a result, there is an urgent need to evaluate the effectiveness of mitigation strategies — such as proactive testing and COVID-19 vaccinations — that can be used to reduce the risk of outbreaks in primary schools and allow them to reopen for in-person learning.
The purpose of this model is to provide a scenario-simulating tool that, when used in concert along with other credible sources of information and data, can aid policymakers and administrators in their decisions around school reopening policies.
This tool uses the SEIRS+ model and was developed in collaboration with modeling experts Carl Bergstrom and Ryan McGee from the University of Washington.
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