The impact of contact tracing and household bubbles on deconfinement strategies for COVID-19
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Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic caused many governments to impose policies restricting social interactions. A controlled and persistent release of lockdown measures covers many potential strategies and is subject to extensive scenario analyses. Here, we use an individual-based model (STRIDE) to simulate interactions between 11 million inhabitants of Belgium at different levels including extended household settings, i.e., “household bubbles”. The burden of COVID-19 is impacted by both the intensity and frequency of physical contacts, and therefore, household bubbles have the potential to reduce hospital admissions by 90%. In addition, we find that it is crucial to complete contact tracing 4 days after symptom onset. Assumptions on the susceptibility of children affect the impact of school reopening, though we find that business and leisure-related social mixing patterns have more impact on COVID-19 associated disease burden. An optimal deployment of the mitigation policies under study require timely compliance to physical distancing, testing and self-isolation.
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SciScore for 10.1101/2020.07.01.20144444: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
NIH rigor criteria are not applicable to paper type.Table 2: Resources
No key resources detected.
Results from OddPub: Thank you for sharing your code.
Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:Limitations: Any model is a simplification of reality and therefore depends on the assumptions made. In addition, our spatially explicit IBM is calibrated on national hospitalization data so uncertainty is inevitably underestimated. As such, we rely on scenario analyses and further sensitivity analyses are necessary. Model results should therefore be interpreted with great caution. Our IBM is a mechanistic mathematical model that uses …
SciScore for 10.1101/2020.07.01.20144444: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
NIH rigor criteria are not applicable to paper type.Table 2: Resources
No key resources detected.
Results from OddPub: Thank you for sharing your code.
Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:Limitations: Any model is a simplification of reality and therefore depends on the assumptions made. In addition, our spatially explicit IBM is calibrated on national hospitalization data so uncertainty is inevitably underestimated. As such, we rely on scenario analyses and further sensitivity analyses are necessary. Model results should therefore be interpreted with great caution. Our IBM is a mechanistic mathematical model that uses conversational contacts as a proxy of events during which transmission can occur. By definition, SARS-CoV-2 infection events that occurred through the environment (e.g., contaminated surfaces) are covered by these conversational contacts. The use of antiviral drugs in combination with CTS can reduce the effect of local outbreaks [34]. This kind of pharmaceutical intervention is not incorporated in the current analysis. We focused on the transmission dynamics in the general population and did not consider care homes separately in our analysis. They form predominantly a sink for infections, with high morbidity and mortality, but are not likely to drive the transmission. To focus on the disease burden in the elderly, the social interactions within elderly homes and with their environment become more important [35]. We did not include aspects related to travel or weather conditions (UV light, humidity, temperature) which may impact both transmission and social contact behaviour in ways that are still largely unknown.
Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.
Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.
Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.
Results from rtransparent:- Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
- Thank you for including a funding statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
- No protocol registration statement was detected.
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