Quantifying the impact of quarantine duration on COVID-19 transmission
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Abstract
The large number of individuals placed into quarantine because of possible severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS CoV-2) exposure has high societal and economic costs. There is ongoing debate about the appropriate duration of quarantine, particularly since the fraction of individuals who eventually test positive is perceived as being low. We use empirically determined distributions of incubation period, infectivity, and generation time to quantify how the duration of quarantine affects onward transmission from traced contacts of confirmed SARS-CoV-2 cases and from returning travellers. We also consider the roles of testing followed by release if negative (test-and-release), reinforced hygiene, adherence, and symptoms in calculating quarantine efficacy. We show that there are quarantine strategies based on a test-and-release protocol that, from an epidemiological viewpoint, perform almost as well as a 10-day quarantine, but with fewer person-days spent in quarantine. The findings apply to both travellers and contacts, but the specifics depend on the context.
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SciScore for 10.1101/2020.09.24.20201061: (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:Potential limitations to our approach could be that these distributions may change throughout the epidemic, particularly depending on how people respond to symptoms (Ali et al., 2020). Furthermore, these distributions could be different between persistently asymptomatic and symptomatic individuals (Buitrago-Garcia et al., 2020). For travellers, another consideration is that lengthy quarantine is seen as a deterrent to travel to high risk areas …
SciScore for 10.1101/2020.09.24.20201061: (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:Potential limitations to our approach could be that these distributions may change throughout the epidemic, particularly depending on how people respond to symptoms (Ali et al., 2020). Furthermore, these distributions could be different between persistently asymptomatic and symptomatic individuals (Buitrago-Garcia et al., 2020). For travellers, another consideration is that lengthy quarantine is seen as a deterrent to travel to high risk areas (IATA, 2020). Any shortening of quarantine may lead to an increase in travel volume, potentially leading to a compounded increase in disease transmission. In the absence of empirical data about the effectiveness of different durations of quarantine, mathematical modelling can be used objectively to explore the fraction of onward transmission by infected contacts or returning travellers that can be prevented. However, determining the optimal quarantine strategy to implement depends on the impact that shortening the duration of quarantine has on individuals, society, and the economy, versus how much weight is assigned to a consequential increase in transmission. Both the individual, societal and economic impact, as well as the weight of transmission increase, will have to be considered based on the current epidemiological situation. We have shown that there are quarantine strategies based on a test-and-release protocol that, from an epidemiological viewpoint, perform almost as well as the standard 10 day quarantine, but with a lower cost ...
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.
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