Optimizing COVID-19 testing strategies on college campuses: evaluation of the health and economic costs.

As a part of the COVID-19 response team at a large public university in the US, we performed an analysis that considered together, the potential health and economic costs of different testing policies for the student body. University administrators had to weigh the up-front effort needed to implement wide scale testing against the potential costs of responding to high levels of disease on campus in the Fall of 2021, after vaccines were widely available but vaccination rates among college students were uncertain. The results presented here are applied to this specific instance, but the online tool provided can be tailored to university specific parameters, the epidemiological conditions, and the goals of the university. As we confront newly emerging variants of COVID-19 or novel pathogens, consideration of both the health and economic costs of proactive testing may serve as a politically tractable and cost-effective disease mitigation strategy.