Reopening International Borders without Quarantine: Contact Tracing Integrated Policy against COVID-19
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Abstract
With the COVID-19 vaccination widely implemented in most countries, propelled by the need to revive the tourism economy, there is a growing prospect for relieving the social distancing regulation and reopening borders in tourism-oriented countries and regions. This need incentivizes stakeholders to develop border control strategies that fully evaluate health risks if mandatory quarantines are lifted. In this study, we have employed a computational approach to investigate the contact tracing integrated policy in different border-reopening scenarios in Hong Kong, China. Explicitly, by reconstructing the COVID-19 transmission from historical data, specific scenarios with joint effects of digital contact tracing and other concurrent measures (i.e., controlling arrival population and community nonpharmacological interventions) are applied to forecast the future development of the pandemic. Built on a modified SEIR epidemic model with a 30% vaccination coverage, the results suggest that scenarios with digital contact tracing and quick isolation intervention can reduce the infectious population by 92.11% compared to those without contact tracing. By further restricting the inbound population with a 10,000 daily quota and applying moderate-to-strong community nonpharmacological interventions (NPIs), the average daily confirmed cases in the forecast period of 60 days can be well controlled at around 9 per day (95% CI: 7–12). Two main policy recommendations are drawn from the study. First, digital contact tracing would be an effective countermeasure for reducing local virus spread, especially when it is applied along with a moderate level of vaccination coverage. Second, implementing a daily quota on inbound travelers and restrictive community NPIs would further keep the local infection under control. This study offers scientific evidence and prospective guidance for developing and instituting plans to lift mandatory border control policies in preparing for the global economic recovery.
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SciScore for 10.1101/2021.06.10.21258672: (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:Nevertheless, several limitations exist in our proposed framework and the designed scenarios. First, our simulation model is built on the epidemiological parameters derived from reported cases in Hong Kong. Based on recent COVID-19 studies and results of the Universal Community Testing Program, we hypothesize that all of the asymptomatic and symptomatic infectious patients are identified, diagnosed, and reported by the case …
SciScore for 10.1101/2021.06.10.21258672: (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:Nevertheless, several limitations exist in our proposed framework and the designed scenarios. First, our simulation model is built on the epidemiological parameters derived from reported cases in Hong Kong. Based on recent COVID-19 studies and results of the Universal Community Testing Program, we hypothesize that all of the asymptomatic and symptomatic infectious patients are identified, diagnosed, and reported by the case surveillance system after the third-wave of outbreak in Hong Kong (Cao et al., 2020; The Government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, 2020; To et al., 2020). Nevertheless, this assumption may not be applied to other countries and regions due to the heterogeneity in case diagnosis and surveillance, whereas the actual infections are estimated to be much greater than the reported cases, for example, 6–24 times higher in the United States (Allen et al., 2020; Havers et al., 2020). Second, real-time NPIs in the past few months are recorded and simulated in our model to understand their effectiveness. However, preventive behaviors on the individual level (e.g., human mobility, face covering), which dictate the likelihood of infection (Chan et al., 2021; Cowling et al., 2020), are not considered in our simulation. Thus, future extensions of the model should emphasize these behavioral factors to better estimate virus transmissibility. Third, our model can simulate the epi curve over a short period (e.g., two months) but is unable to predict results o...
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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