Aligning staffing schedules with testing and isolation strategies reduces the risk of COVID-19 outbreaks in carceral and other congregate settings: A simulation study
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Abstract
COVID-19 outbreaks in congregate settings remain a serious threat to the health of disproportionately affected populations such as people experiencing incarceration or homelessness, the elderly, and essential workers. An individual-based model accounting for individual infectiousness over time, staff work schedules, and testing and isolation schedules was developed to simulate community transmission of SARS-CoV-2 to staff in a congregate facility and subsequent transmission within the facility that could cause an outbreak. Systematic testing strategies in which staff are tested on the first day of their workweek were found to prevent up to 16% more transmission events than testing strategies unrelated to staff schedules. Testing staff at the beginning of their workweek, implementing timely isolation following testing, limiting test turnaround time, and increasing test frequency in high transmission scenarios can supplement additional mitigation measures to aid outbreak prevention in congregate settings.
Article summary line
Aligning routine testing with work schedules among staff in carceral facilities and other congregate settings can enhance the early detection and isolation of COVID-19 cases, limiting the potential for staff to inadvertently trigger outbreaks in high-risk settings.
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SciScore for 10.1101/2021.10.22.21265396: (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 and data.
Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:There are several notable limitations to this model. First, staff are not the only source of infection, as there are other potential sources of importation into the facility including: intake of new residents, visitation, facility movement, and work programs where residents leave the facility during the day. Second, the exclusion of notable COVID-19 prevention strategies (e.g. universal masking, physical distancing, proper ventilation) …
SciScore for 10.1101/2021.10.22.21265396: (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 and data.
Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:There are several notable limitations to this model. First, staff are not the only source of infection, as there are other potential sources of importation into the facility including: intake of new residents, visitation, facility movement, and work programs where residents leave the facility during the day. Second, the exclusion of notable COVID-19 prevention strategies (e.g. universal masking, physical distancing, proper ventilation) and of additional testing due to symptoms or known contacts is a limitation of our model. However, if additional control interventions were implemented, we expect qualitative trends in the expected number of transmission events to persist between testing strategies and frequencies across different transmission scenarios. Third, we do not distinguish between staff-to-staff and staff-to-resident transmission events within a simulated facility, but rather record the total number of transmission events assuming ℛ remains constant rather than decreasing due to susceptible depletion. Estimation of staff-staff and staff-resident contact rates or reproduction numbers would enable more precise accounting and simulation of importation events and subsequent transmission within a facility. Fourth, we assume that the probability density function of the triangle distribution is an accurate representation of SARS-CoV-2 viral dynamics and therefore infectiousness through time. Though this function captures the general viral dynamics profile seen previously (19...
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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