If an epidemic were to happen at UTA, the campus wouldn’t be prepared to deal with it.

At least that’s biology freshman Ross Armant estimated when he wrote a compelling paper about the possibility of an epidemic for an English class about covering data of epidemics.

Ross imagines the worst-case scenario play out if an virus spread, but not like the so-called Ebola “outbreak” of 2014.

“Ebola was a very rare incident and wasn’t really a true outbreak,” he said.

The disease would infect the UTA community — and would then spread to the greater DFW area. He studied how quickly it spreads with a simple modelbased on the Spanish flu epidemic. Each infected person is likely to infect two other people.

“Now that we had an idea of it from different angles we could hypothetically figure out what would happen if an outbreak were to erupt in this area,” he said.

Ross found that Arlington doesn’t have a plan set for an outbreak, but if something did happen, it would mirror a plan that already exists at the Tarrant County level. There would be greater emphasis on hospitals and personal hygiene, and maybe certain businesses would reduce their hours, he said.

From there he took human behavior into account. He specifically looked at UTA’s response to the outbreak and how long it would take to identify it. Then he estimated how the city and county would react. He figured that local officials would also have greater jurisdiction than normal.

Ross said he chose UTA for his scenario because he thought it would be interesting. He enjoys learning about epidemics because it has the appeal of a dystopian novel.

But he doesn’t plan to go into epidimiology — perhaps neuroscience, instead. He’s also open to any research opportunities that might come his way.