Date of Award

6-2021

Degree Name

MS in Computer Science

Department/Program

Computer Science

College

College of Engineering

Advisor

Theresa Migler

Advisor Department

Computer Science

Advisor College

College of Engineering

Abstract

When attempting to mitigate the spread of an epidemic without the use of a vaccine, many measures may be made to dampen the spread of the disease such as physically distancing and wearing masks. The implementation of an effective test and quarantine strategy on a population has the potential to make a large impact on the spread of the disease as well. Testing and quarantining strategies become difficult when a portion of the population are asymptomatic spreaders of the disease. Additionally, a study has shown that randomly testing a portion of a population for asymptomatic individuals makes a small impact on the spread of a disease. This thesis simulates the transmission of the virus that causes COVID-19, SARSCoV- 2, in contact networks gathered from real world interactions in five different environments. In these simulations, several testing and quarantining strategies are implemented with a varying number of tests per day. These strategies include a random testing strategy and several uniform testing strategies, based on knowledge of the underlying network. By modeling the population interactions as a graph, we are able to extract properties of the graph and test based on those metrics, namely the degree of the network. This thesis found many of the strategies had a similar performance to randomly testing the population, save for testing by degree and testing the cliques of the graph, which was found to consistently outperform other strategies, especially on networks that are more dense. Additionally, we found that any testing and quarantining of a population could significantly reduce the peak number of infections in a community.

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