Cascading disasters
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Social distancing requires people to remain physically apart, but many prevention and response activities require close interaction. For example, evacuation shelters typically bring hundreds of people into close proximity, but evacuees may need to move into hotels or other spaces with individual rooms to prevent the spread of COVID-19. In addition, wildfire mitigation efforts like prescribed burns or home retrofits may diminish as a result of social distancing. Can you develop a system to determine how emergency managers can physically separate people while also removing them from immediate danger? Or can you develop a model to predict how decreases in projected wildfire mitigation may influence wildfire spread or severity?