March 11, 2021
Today was our first off-campus day in Bear Creek Park. The morning consisted of completing a worksheet on the different ways a pathogen can spread and doing a simulation on the spread of HIV. In the afternoon, we worked with Dr. Gillon on Google Sheets to model the spread of a disease through a population and learn about how vaccine decisions can be made using math. During this lesson, we learned about how you can show which groups of people can be vaccinated by using numbers, which I found to be very interesting. Along with that, we talked about quality-adjusted life years and how they impact decisions made in medicine. A challenge that I and many others in the group faced was the cold weather. However, when we made s’mores and drank some hot chocolate, it made things a lot better. Some takeaways I had from today were a better understanding of how quality-adjusted life-years work and how vaccines are distributed.
