COVID-19: Mitigating Potential Propagation by Truck Drivers in Botswana

Brief Description: When the COVID-19 pandemic broke, many government decision makers around the world had to act quickly. One of the professors in my department, Professor Ashish Goel, realized that there was a disproportionate distribution of efforts to model the pandemic between previously colonized countries and the west. He put together a project class to use computer modeling to help previously colonized countries confront the pandemic. My team and I worked with contacts at the Presidential TaskForce on Covid-19 in Botswana to model the unique problem of managing the risk of cases imported via the ground transportation of essential goods and services from their hard-hit neighbors. I recorded a YouTube video to go over the final presentation we gave in more detail. After the class ended, I recruited another colleague to continue working on the project under Professor Goel's supervision. You can read up on our work here.