Analyses of Covid trends
at the University of Illinois

Since the university reopened in Fall 2020, I have closely monitored the numbers of Covid cases on campus and the reasons for spread. My analyses are intended to be a reliable source of publicly available information. The University has not always been transparent about the situation on campus, so I have provided additional estimates of the information that was not available. I also provide daily updates about hospitalizations and spread in the community surrounding campus.

Here are links to the various summaries and write-ups I've been tweeting about and posting publicly on Facebook.

• I post almost daily updates at http://www.dansimons.com/covid.html. Monitor that page for the most recent daily case numbers, 7-day averages, hospitalizations/deaths in the community, etc. The page includes daily updated graphs and explanations of them.
  

• My summary of the entire fall semester is available at http://www.dansimons.com/Covid/fall2020summary.html
• That summary includes a discussion of the modeling that was used to justify reopening as well as how it was both right and badly wrong.
• It also discusses how the University placed blame for the initial surge in cases on a handful of non-compliant students without taking any responsibility for logistical failures and inaccurate initial assumptions about compliance.

• My analyses of delays in test processing and how they contributed to the spread of Covid on campus is at http://www.dansimons.com/Covid/testTiming.html

• My essay on how to interpret positivity ratios correctly, including a discussion of why positivity is the wrong metric to use when you are testing everyone in your population of interest repeatedly (as was the case at the University of Illinois this fall) is at http://www.dansimons.com/Covid/positivity.html
  

I have turned off comments for this post. If you would like to comment, please do so in response to my regular tweets (@profsimons) on this topic. This post is a placeholder so that the links are findable.