Country-specific optimization of testing rates and unlock measures can help to contain COVID19 infection

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Abstract

In response to the COVID19 outbreak many countries have implemented lockdown to ensure social distancing. However, long lockdowns globally affected the livelihood of millions of people resulting in subsequent unlocks that started a second wave of infection in multiple countries. Unlocking of the economies critically imposes extra burden on testing and quarantine of the infected people to keep the reproduction number ( R 0 ) <1. This, as we demonstrate, requires optimizing a cost-benefit trade-off between testing rate and unlock extent. We delineate a strategy to optimize the trade-off by utilizing a data-trained epidemic model and coupling it with a stochastic agent based model to implement contact tracing. In a country specific manner, we quantitatively demonstrate how combination of unlock and testing can maintain R 0 <1.

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  1. SciScore for 10.1101/2020.05.20.20107169: (What is this?)

    Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.

    Table 1: Rigor

    Institutional Review Board Statementnot detected.
    Randomizationnot detected.
    Blindingnot detected.
    Power Analysisnot detected.
    Sex as a biological variablenot detected.

    Table 2: Resources

    No key resources detected.


    Results from OddPub: We did not detect open data. We also did not detect open code. Researchers are encouraged to share open data when possible (see Nature blog).


    Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:
    Indeed, previous studies discuss the limitations of ODE based models and agent based models [30] but none of the studies connected both the approaches in the context of COVID19 epidemics. Here, by connecting the ODE model with the agent based model, we derive country specific optimal testing-rate through contact tracing that is required to allow a certain degree of unlocking to open up the economy. The model can also potentially demonstrate the advantage of contact tracing over random sampling (data not shown). Lockdown is a preparatory measure for the health care system to reorganize itself to deal with the situation since long term lock down would be detrimental to the economy of any country[29]. Typically the actual infected number of people is expected to be higher than the sampled one’s and limitations like that pose challenges for devising accurate mathematical models [30]. Actual susceptible population size is thus mostly unknown and it could often be different from the tested population size, in either direction. As a result, the number of infected people from the data only captures the infected people out of the tested sample. This is one of the reasons why increased testing rate is so important in capturing the real magnitude of the infection (and not only the dynamics) that would also lead to devising more accurate epidemic models with better predictive capacities as underpinning the size of true susceptible population in an infected country is key to improving mod...

    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.
    • Thank you for including a protocol registration statement.

    About SciScore

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