COVID-19 Modeling to Keep Cornell University Open Throughout the Pandemic

Abstract

Unlike most universities, Cornell University reopened its Ithaca campus for in-person instruction in the Fall of 2020 during the COVID period and did so safely through the use of pooled testing. This decision and many others were guided by our mathematical modeling group. I'll discuss some of the questions we explored, the models we built, the data that informed our models, and how we dealt with several central data issues. Our work "under fire" motivated our current work in exploiting biased data in epidemiological models.