Tracing and testing multiple generations of contacts to COVID-19 cases: cost–benefit trade-offs
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Abstract
Traditional contact tracing tests the direct contacts of those who test positive. But, by the time an infected individual is tested, the infection starting from the person may have infected a chain of individuals. Hence, why should the testing stop at direct contacts, and not test secondary, tertiary contacts or even contacts further down? One deterrent in testing long chains of individuals right away may be that it substantially increases the testing load, or does it? We investigate the costs and benefits of such multi-hop contact tracing for different number of hops. Considering diverse contact networks, we show that the cost–benefit trade-off can be characterized in terms of a single measurable attribute, the initial epidemic growth rate . Once this growth rate crosses a threshold, multi-hop contact tracing substantially reduces the outbreak size compared with traditional tracing. Multi-hop even incurs a lower cost compared with the traditional tracing for a large range of values of the growth rate. The cost–benefit trade-offs can be classified into three phases depending on the value of the growth rate. The need for choosing a larger number of hops becomes greater as the growth rate increases or the environment becomes less conducive toward containing the disease.
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SciScore for 10.1101/2021.06.29.21259723: (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:We now discuss limitations of multi-hop contact tracing in the current context and how to circumvent the limitations in order to prevent a future epidemic from becoming a pandemic. First, the benefits of contact tracing, both single hop and multi-hop, considerably decrease if a non-negligible percentage of the society do not reveal their contacts, do not test, and do not quarantine when asked to. Cooperation with health authorities varies …
SciScore for 10.1101/2021.06.29.21259723: (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:We now discuss limitations of multi-hop contact tracing in the current context and how to circumvent the limitations in order to prevent a future epidemic from becoming a pandemic. First, the benefits of contact tracing, both single hop and multi-hop, considerably decrease if a non-negligible percentage of the society do not reveal their contacts, do not test, and do not quarantine when asked to. Cooperation with health authorities varies across the world: while a high degree of cooperation was witnessed in South Korea and Taiwan which had suffered from large scale epidemics in the last twenty years (26, 27), cooperation was lower in Europe and US (28), both of which experienced a large scale epidemic about a century ago (the 1918 flu). Learning from the experience of this pandemic, public awareness campaigns need to be pursued to elicit cooperation with health authorities. Multi-hop may provide an important advantage to ensure cooperation in that it can contain the outbreak faster which may incentivize full cooperation for a short duration, whereas cooperation may wane due to pandemic-fatigue as time progresses. Next, manual tracing of contacts is a labor intensive activity even for single-hop tracing. This over-load will likely be exacerbated for multi-hop during the initial days of the tracing. This is because although in many instances testing and quarantining (and therefore tracing) costs over time were lower for multi-hop as compared to single-hop, at the start, invaria...
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.
Results from scite Reference Check: We found no unreliable references.
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