Cost–benefit of limited isolation and testing in COVID-19 mitigation
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Abstract
The international community has been put in an unprecedented situation by the COVID-19 pandemic. Creating models to describe and quantify alternative mitigation strategies becomes increasingly urgent. In this study, we propose an agent-based model of disease transmission in a society divided into closely connected families, workplaces, and social groups. This allows us to discuss mitigation strategies, including targeted quarantine measures. We find that workplace and more diffuse social contacts are roughly equally important to disease spread, and that an effective lockdown must target both. We examine the cost–benefit of replacing a lockdown with tracing and quarantining contacts of the infected. Quarantine can contribute substantially to mitigation, even if it has short duration and is done within households. When reopening society, testing and quarantining is a strategy that is much cheaper in terms of lost workdays than a long lockdown. A targeted quarantine strategy is quite efficient with only 5 days of quarantine, and its effect increases when testing is more widespread.
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SciScore for 10.1101/2020.04.09.20059790: (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 data.
Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:The effect of such limitations is in our model parameterized through the detection probability. From Fig. 3(c) one sees that when the detection probability goes below 3 % (a rate of 1 % per day) the peak reduction of the 1STQ strategy becomes only of the order 1 percentage point. It should also be noted that, since we rely on symptoms to determine who stays in quarantine, and people in the infectious/symptomatic stage are assumed to always stay …
SciScore for 10.1101/2020.04.09.20059790: (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 data.
Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:The effect of such limitations is in our model parameterized through the detection probability. From Fig. 3(c) one sees that when the detection probability goes below 3 % (a rate of 1 % per day) the peak reduction of the 1STQ strategy becomes only of the order 1 percentage point. It should also be noted that, since we rely on symptoms to determine who stays in quarantine, and people in the infectious/symptomatic stage are assumed to always stay in quarantine, we implicitly assume that all infected persons develop at least some symptoms at some point. This may be a break from reality. The increasing availability of tests may also change the perspectives of the 1STQ strategy. With widely available rapid tests, it will be possible to test everyone regularly, and to test all quarantined persons before they leave quarantine. Supplementary figure S4 deals with the results of such a testing strategy. To put this into perspective, the drawbacks of widespread, but slow testing is examined in the supplementary figure S5. One interesting point which we have not examined here, is that real-world social networks are heterogeneous, with a large variance in number of contacts. It may be expected, for example, that workers in customer-facing positions in shops will have a high risk of catching the disease and passing it on. The effects of this heterogeneity is examined more closely in ref.22. Here, it is concluded that heterogeneity in the number of contacts enhances the effect of contact tr...
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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