Regional opening strategies with commuter testing and containment of new SARS-CoV-2 variants in Germany
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Abstract
Background
Despite the vaccination process in Germany, a large share of the population is still susceptible to SARS-CoV-2. In addition, we face the spread of novel variants. Until we overcome the pandemic, reasonable mitigation and opening strategies are crucial to balance public health and economic interests.
Methods
We model the spread of SARS-CoV-2 over the German counties by a graph-SIR-type, metapopulation model with particular focus on commuter testing. We account for political interventions by varying contact reduction values in private and public locations such as homes, schools, workplaces, and other. We consider different levels of lockdown strictness, commuter testing strategies, or the delay of intervention implementation. We conduct numerical simulations to assess the effectiveness of the different intervention strategies after one month. The virus dynamics in the regions (German counties) are initialized randomly with incidences between 75 and 150 weekly new cases per 100,000 inhabitants (red zones) or below (green zones) and consider 25 different initial scenarios of randomly distributed red zones (between 2 and 20% of all counties). To account for uncertainty, we consider an ensemble set of 500 Monte Carlo runs for each scenario.
Results
We find that the strength of the lockdown in regions with out of control virus dynamics is most important to avoid the spread into neighboring regions. With very strict lockdowns in red zones, commuter testing rates of twice a week can substantially contribute to the safety of adjacent regions. In contrast, the negative effect of less strict interventions can be overcome by high commuter testing rates. A further key contributor is the potential delay of the intervention implementation. In order to keep the spread of the virus under control, strict regional lockdowns with minimum delay and commuter testing of at least twice a week are advisable. If less strict interventions are in favor, substantially increased testing rates are needed to avoid overall higher infection dynamics.
Conclusions
Our results indicate that local containment of outbreaks and maintenance of low overall incidence is possible even in densely populated and highly connected regions such as Germany or Western Europe. While we demonstrate this on data from Germany, similar patterns of mobility likely exist in many countries and our results are, hence, generalizable to a certain extent.
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SciScore for 10.1101/2021.04.23.21255995: (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:A limitation of the approach is that border regions are not considered, e.g., the impact of systematically higher incidences in a neighbouring country. However, since our simulation approach consists of randomly initialized generic scenarios, our conclusions also hold true for mobility across German borders. Our results clearly indicate that a combined strategy of local lockdowns and systematic testing has the potential to contain isolated …
SciScore for 10.1101/2021.04.23.21255995: (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:A limitation of the approach is that border regions are not considered, e.g., the impact of systematically higher incidences in a neighbouring country. However, since our simulation approach consists of randomly initialized generic scenarios, our conclusions also hold true for mobility across German borders. Our results clearly indicate that a combined strategy of local lockdowns and systematic testing has the potential to contain isolated local outbreaks in a general low incidence setting. In particular, rather strict local measures in combination with frequent testing of commuters proves highly effective in preventing the spread of localized infection hot spots and reducing the incidence in these regions. This can be seen both in the number of counties that need to impose measures and in the median incidence in the simulations which can be brought to surprisingly low levels with the most effective strategies. The results further clearly indicate a hierarchy of effectiveness that depends on the strength of the locally imposed measures, the duration of the delay with which they are imposed after a critical incidence threshold has been reached, and the frequency at which commuters are tested which ultimately determines the fraction of imported cases that are found. Interestingly, although the strength of the locally imposed measures dominates the further development of a local outbreak as expected, our simulations indicate that with an effective daily testing regimen and a swi...
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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