A renewal equation model to assess roles and limitations of contact tracing for disease outbreak control
This article has been Reviewed by the following groups
Listed in
- Evaluated articles (ScreenIT)
Abstract
We propose a deterministic model capturing essential features of contact tracing as part of public health non-pharmaceutical interventions to mitigate an outbreak of an infectious disease. By incorporating a mechanistic formulation of the processes at the individual level, we obtain an integral equation (delayed in calendar time and advanced in time since infection) for the probability that an infected individual is detected and isolated at any point in time. This is then coupled with a renewal equation for the total incidence to form a closed system describing the transmission dynamics involving contact tracing. We define and calculate basic and effective reproduction numbers in terms of pathogen characteristics and contact tracing implementation constraints. When applied to the case of SARS-CoV-2, our results show that only combinations of diagnosis of symptomatic infections and contact tracing that are almost perfect in terms of speed and coverage can attain control, unless additional measures to reduce overall community transmission are in place. Under constraints on the testing or tracing capacity, a temporary interruption of contact tracing may, depending on the overall growth rate and prevalence of the infection, lead to an irreversible loss of control even when the epidemic was previously contained.
Article activity feed
-
-
-
SciScore for 10.1101/2020.12.27.20232934: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
Institutional Review Board Statement not detected. Randomization not detected. Blinding not detected. Power Analysis not detected. Sex as a biological variable not detected. Table 2: Resources
No key resources detected.
Results from OddPub: Thank you for sharing your code and data.
Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:The model has several limitations that could be addressed in future work. First, it is based on the assumption of homogeneous mixing, so clustered contact tracing, for instance focused on households or realistic social networks [7, 13, 31, 32, 33], is not captured in this framework. Some level of heterogeneity could be …
SciScore for 10.1101/2020.12.27.20232934: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
Institutional Review Board Statement not detected. Randomization not detected. Blinding not detected. Power Analysis not detected. Sex as a biological variable not detected. Table 2: Resources
No key resources detected.
Results from OddPub: Thank you for sharing your code and data.
Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:The model has several limitations that could be addressed in future work. First, it is based on the assumption of homogeneous mixing, so clustered contact tracing, for instance focused on households or realistic social networks [7, 13, 31, 32, 33], is not captured in this framework. Some level of heterogeneity could be incorporated by considering a vector-valued incidence and contact mixing matrices. Second, to simplify the presentation of the model and to obtain preliminary insights, we have here assumed instantaneous contact tracing. More realistic tracing delays could be incorporated. Third, in the current model, the infectivity profile is assumed to be independent of the incubation time. Given the efficacy of contact tracing is strongly affected by the amount of pre-symptomatic transmission, an important extension would consist in incorporating the correlation between individual infectiousness and onset of symptoms. Fourth, the model only tracks infected individuals, ignoring contacts that did not lead to an infection. The advantage is that our construction does not require specifying the contact rate in the overall population, but only the infectivity profile of infected individuals. However, by making assumptions about the overall contact rate, we could further describe the tracing and possible quarantine of contacted individuals that escaped infection. Quarantine of susceptible individuals is a fundamental aspect for socio-economic evaluations of the impact of a contac...
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.
-