Subject: Infections

Posted by Scott Guthrie on 10/15/2009
In Reply To:Infections Posted by Tim Joy on 10/14/2009

Message:

We have a number of students out with “something” (probably the usual Winter-Close-Up-The-School-Building-Cold). I currently have our attendance office tracking the total number of absences per day. While there will be some noise in the data due to the many other reasons for an absence (we don’t track reasons!), my suspicion is that the expected “infection” curve shape should show up well. The interesting thing will be to see how many peaks there are in the data by the end of flu season.

It would be interesting to set some kind of policy with this information and a model, but the current district system of “information to decision-maker to actual policy decision” involves so much delay that any decision made would take longer than the flu season itself (maybe even the next few flu seasons). However, while we can’t seem to keep soap in the bathrooms, we have managed to get hand sanitizer into our computer labs.

It will also be interesting to see how well absentee data tracks with respect to the google flutrends data site (http://www.google.org/flutrends/) – Oregon is currently “intense”

I’m saving the data for a good discussion of an infection model when I get to it in class.

-scott

Follow Ups:

Infections - Jim Duggan 10/16/2009