Written and Researched by Evan Wang (15), Certificate of Distinction by placing in the top 0.57% of more than 19,000 students (top 100 out of 19000) writing the Fermat Math contest globally.

Motivation

As school comes back into session, there seems to not be much actionable advice. The advice that I have found is vague, like increasing ventilation. How much do you need to increase ventilation and how much safer will it make me? I along with many of my friends and family are concerned about the spread of COVID-19 in schools. I am not an expert but I am an incoming sophomore who has read a lot about what is going on and has done a bunch of research over the summer. All the math is based on publicly available information from institutions like the WHO and CDC.

https://www.who.int/water_sanitation_health/publications/natural_ventilation.pdf

Large groups, positivity, activity and how it affects risk

You should not hang out in large groups due to the greater possibility of someone being symptomatic or not symptomatic.

Depending on how serious of a case of COVID-19 a person has, they expel a certain quanta of virus particles. Quanta is a unit of measuring how many virus particles a person is expelling. This quanta affects how much risk you are at of contracting COVID-19. A person who is not doing much and is asymptomatic could release less than one quanta of virus particles while someone who is very sick would release 4-6 quantas. I am estimating the risk of contracting COVID-19 based on the new cases per million, but there is no way to know the exact numbers because people are getting infected all the time and test results often come back a week late.