Operation Outbreak simulation teaches students how pandemics spread


Date:
September 3, 2020
Source:
Cell Press
Summary:
A new article highlights Operation Outbreak, an educational platform
and simulation intended to teach high school and college students
the fundamentals of responses to pandemics.



FULL STORY ==========================================================================
In 2015, a team of specialists in modeling disease outbreaks got together
with educators to create Operation Outbreak, an educational platform
and simulation intended to teach high school and college students the fundamentals of responses to pandemics. The program, which is open source
and freely available, was designed to simulate outbreaks with different variables (such as R0 and mode of transmission) and to generate data
in the context of real human behavior. It includes a Bluetooth-based
app that carries out contact tracing by recording transmission events
between phones. The details are highlighted in a Commentary published
August 31 in the journal Cell.


========================================================================== Operation Outbreak came about after Todd Brown, then a middle
school teacher in Florida, contacted Pardis Sabeti (@PardisSabeti),
a computational biologist at the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT,
after reading a profile of her in a magazine. He and his students were
studying the ongoing Ebola outbreak in West Africa, and he was developing
a simulation of how the virus spread using stickers.

As they continued to work together, Sabeti and her team, including Andre's Colubri (@codeanticode), at the time a computational scientist in her lab, began studying mumps outbreaks across Boston college campuses. The idea
to create an educational app that "spread" viruses through Bluetooth
was soon born. And as recently as December 2019, they were running
simulations modeling the outbreak of a virus with a very similar modus
operandi to SARS-CoV-2.

"We decided to use a SARS-like virus since it had been high on many
pandemic researchers' lists as a concern," says Colubri, who is now at
the University of Massachusetts Medical School. "To make the simulation
more challenging, we included an element of asymptomatic spread. This
was a natural concern that would elevate a pandemic's potential even
further." This summer, as the COVID-19 pandemic continued to spread,
Operation Outbreak was rolled out to 2,000 students in Chicago who were participating as "social distancing ambassadors" as part of the One Summer Chicago program. Participants used the app to track and trace behaviors
and learn how "infections" spread in different parts of the city.

"The platform and curriculum are very flexible from an academic and also
an experiential learning standpoint," Brown says. "We tried to gamify the education, so that players' behaviors and decisions affect not only them,
but the entire group they're playing with." The simulation includes
elements that have become a familiar part of our daily lives, like
limitations in testing abilities and shortages of personal protective
equipment (PPE). The program also offers the ability to simulate
additional elements that could arise in the current pandemic or in future
ones, such as other circulating viruses that can complicate diagnosis.

"We are in one of the most unique situations in the history of the world,
by virtue of being able to engage students," says Brown, who is now
community outreach director at Sarasota Military Academy. "Kids are
more primed to learn when something directly affects them and their
families. This is a chance for future generations to become aware of
how infections spread and to recognize warning signs." "I hope we can
convey that we don't have to wait for the next pandemic to learn how to
respond to them," Sabeti says. "Ultimately, we can exquisitely model
every aspect of viruses and how they spread, even in the ways that we
react through vaccines, protective gear, and diagnostics." The team
has put together a scalable curriculum, including a textbook and series
of educational videos, that can be integrated at schools around the
country. The materials, which have been funded by philanthropy, are open
source and are available for free.

This work is supported by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation and
the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Additional funding grants include
L'Oreal USA Women in Science Changing the Face of STEM, Toshiba America Foundation, Florida Association of International Baccalaureate World
Schools, and Voya Financial.


========================================================================== Story Source: Materials provided by Cell_Press. Note: Content may be
edited for style and length.


========================================================================== Journal Reference:
1. Andre's Colubri, Molly Kemball, Kian Sani, Chloe Boehm, Karen Mutch-
Jones, Ben Fry, Todd Brown, Pardis C. Sabeti. Preventing outbreaks
through interactive, experiential real-life simulations. Cell,
2020; DOI: 10.1016/j.cell.2020.08.042 ==========================================================================

Link to news story: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/09/200903105559.htm

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