Mass testing to end the COVID-19 public health threat

Philippe, Cécile; Bar‐Yam, Yaneer; Bilodeau, Stephane; Gershenson, Carlos; Raina, Sunil Kumar; Chiou, Shu-Ti; Nyborg, Gunhild Alvik; Schneider, Mat­thias

doi:10.1016/j.lanepe.2022.100574

Cited by 11 publications

(12 citation statements)

References 7 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…And what about whether we ought to trust the traditional simplistic compartmental models (e.g. Susceptible-Infected-Recovered -'SIR' -and its extensions; , inherent assumptions of which make it seem an elimination approach to curtail pathogen spread (Baker et al, 2020(Baker et al, , 2023Philippe et al, 2023) is impossible?…”

Section: Social Psychology and Its Crisesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…To illustrate with a practical example, let us consider the example of implementing mass testing to curtail or eliminate a pandemic, which has been modeled to be a highly cost-effective public health action (Philippe et al, 2023). Suppose a municipality introduces a policy encouraging households to conduct daily saliva-based tests as part of their morning routine, strongly recommending self-isolation for positive results.…”

Section: Interconnectednessmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Consider Figure 9C, where the potential of an attractor shift to destruction ought to be mitigated on a priori grounds, not because there is certainty of its eventual materialisation. At the time of writing, SARS-CoV-2 is allowed to reproduce and mutate relatively freely, even though alternatives are available (Lazarus et al, 2022;Philippe et al, 2023) -this is akin to tolerating a decaying tree next to our house, because costs of felling it are large, and it may not eventually collapse in our direction. Part of the reason for this is the politicisation of pandemic response (Brusselaers et al, 2022), and a route to avoiding the same pitfalls would be to aid in creation of operational capacities for swift action, so that structures which allow low-cost response are available when needed.…”

Section: A More Inclusive View Of Behaviour Change Under Uncertainty?mentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Understanding and shaping complex social psychological systems: Lessons from an emerging paradigm to thrive in an uncertain world

Heino¹

2023

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

In today's rapidly evolving world, human behaviour plays a crucial role in addressing complex challenges. These span from mitigating non-communicable diseases, to climate action and pandemic preparedness. Traditional behaviour change research has focused on identifying and addressing specific factors that impede positive change, using a decomposition-based approach. This approach breaks key behaviours down into their component parts, and seeks to affect influences – again broken down into e.g. attitudes, social norms, resources and other opportunity-related factors – on these components. Component-dominant dynamics refer to a situation, where the behaviour of a system is determined primarily by the properties of its individual components, rather than by emergent phenomena. The decomposition-based approach is highly effective when this is the case. However, the approach may have severely limited effectiveness in contexts characterized by interaction-dominant dynamics, where outcomes are determined not by individual components, but emerge from the ongoing interdependent influences between them. Interaction-dominant systems have been studied in various fields under the interdisciplinary rubric of complex systems science. This work argues that people are active agentic creatures, who are self-determined and self-organising experts of their own environments, which infuses social systems with inherent non-stationarity and hence uncertainty: Objects of study in behaviour change science, as well as their relationships, change. In addition, small events can cause large impacts, and long periods of apparent stability can be punctuated by rapid change. This implies that past data may be of limited use for inference and interventions across contexts or time. Indeed, the opportunities and risks laying in the future of complex systems or decision making contexts, are vastly more numerous than those which could be called merely complicated. Therefore, it should be carefully evaluated, to what extent a given situation is indeed amenable to decomposition-based solutions. While it might be impossible to predict the long-term future of some complex “non-linear” systems, risks and opportunities can be evaluated based on evolutionary potential of their space of possibilities. The specific contribution of articles included in this work supports the argument as follows. Article I takes the view of people as agentic, autonomous decision makers, and points to the need to foster their capacity to self-organise. It describes a compendium of techniques, which (combined with proper scaffolding and support) could enable individuals to better self-manage their motivation and behaviour. Article II uses data containing self-management techniques to demonstrate a conceptually important model, where behaviours – and what the literature has conventionally considered their influences, precursors, or determinants – are represented as components of a mutually interacting network. The network representation reflects a deviation from the conventional conceptualisation, which hinges on component-dominant dynamics to depict simplistic causes and their effects with boxes and arrows. The article also discusses the importance of distributional shapes, as well as how summary statistics developed for simple, symmetric distributions can misdirect inference when the shape is more varied. Article III proposes a process definition of behaviour change, particularly calling for attention to some core features of complex systems; interconnectedness, non-ergodicity and non-linearity. It points out how interaction-dominant dynamics can produce distributional shapes, poorly amenable conventional analysis. It also discusses problems of traditional linear models of between-individual data for studying behaviour change, and expands the idea of aforementioned between-individual networks to those containing temporal recurrences of idiographic system states – attractors. Article IV depicts how the conceptualisation of behaviour change as movement in an attractor landscape can be used to understand change on different scales of observation, from individuals to communities and the society at large. It brings our attention to how non-linearities in interconnected systems can mean sudden transitions after long periods of stability and, more generally, the need to be wary of attractor states yet unseen, when there is uncertainty about distribution shapes.To address the transparency and irreducibility concerns currently being voiced across scientific disciplines, all the data and analysis scripts are made publicly available online. Apart from Article I, these supplements are produced directly from the data as accompanying websites to reduce error and increase accessibility.

show abstract

Section: Social Psychology and Its Crisesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Interconnectednessmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: A More Inclusive View Of Behaviour Change Under Uncertainty?mentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Understanding and shaping complex social psychological systems: Lessons from an emerging paradigm to thrive in an uncertain world

Heino¹

2023

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…The case cannot be clearer as we emerge from the COVID-19 pandemic. Multiple innovations were central to our response against COVID-19, including mass testing 1 and genomic tracking of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, 2 the creation of vaccines, 3 , 4 , 5 data linkage across health systems, modelling of the impact of public health interventions, 6 and the development of new treatments. 7 These scientific advances occurred at unprecedented pace and saved millions of lives.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Resilience to emerging infectious diseases and the importance of scientific innovation

Wilson,

Thomson

2024

Future Healthcare Journal

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

“…Relatively small-scale or short-term use of mass testing was implemented in several locations [35, 28, 34, 16, 13], along with extensive use in China [41]. Compared to other non-pharmaceutical interventions like social distancing, mass testing bears less of a burden than imposing widespread social distancing [32].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Effective contact tracing can halve mass testing frequency needed to control respiratory virus pandemics

Srimokla,

Petrie

2023

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Mass testing is a promising strategy to control future respiratory virus pandemics, however, it is limited by the availability of testing capacity. The aim of this work is to predict the effectiveness of contact tracing when used with mass testing, and to what extent contact tracing can reduce the required number of tests. We estimate the effect of contact tracing and mass testing for controlling a variety of respiratory virus pandemics. To do this, we use a branching model with individuals whose infectiousness and probability of testing positive depend on simulated viral load trajectories. We find that the addition of contact tracing is most useful when mass testing is done frequently enough to detect most infections, but cannot be done frequently enough to reliably isolate cases before they infect others. Our results show that the addition of effective contact tracing can prevent the same number of transmissions as doubling the mass testing frequency.

show abstract

Mass testing to end the COVID-19 public health threat

Cited by 11 publications

References 7 publications

Understanding and shaping complex social psychological systems: Lessons from an emerging paradigm to thrive in an uncertain world

Understanding and shaping complex social psychological systems: Lessons from an emerging paradigm to thrive in an uncertain world

Resilience to emerging infectious diseases and the importance of scientific innovation

Effective contact tracing can halve mass testing frequency needed to control respiratory virus pandemics

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About