Requirements for the containment of COVID-19 disease outbreaks through periodic testing, isolation, and quarantine

Abstract

We employ individual-based Monte Carlo computer simulations of a stochastic SEIR model variant on a two-dimensional Newman-Watts small-world network to investigate the control of epidemic outbreaks through periodic testing and isolation of infectious individuals, and subsequent quarantine of their immediate contacts. Using disease parameters informed by the COVID-19 pandemic, we investigate the effects of various crucial mitigation features on the epidemic spreading: fraction of the infectious population that is identifiable through the tests; testing frequency; time delay between testing and isolation of positively tested individuals; and the further time delay until quarantining their contacts as well as the quarantine duration. We thus determine the required ranges for these intervention parameters to yield effective control of the disease through both considerable delaying the epidemic peak and massively reducing the total number of sustained infections.

Nonlinear dynamics of an epidemic compartment model with asymptomatic infections and mitigation

“…Equating (27) to the initial value H(0) = N − S * ln N of H corresponding to a completely susceptible population, we conclude that…”

“…The isolation of symptomatic cases and the testing of asymptomatic individuals are among the most important strategies for containing an epidemic by non-pharmaceutical means [9,11,12,15,26,27]. Adding the corresponding processes to the dynamical system (1)-( 4) with isolation and testing rates ν I and ν T leads to the extended model…”

“…Epidemic compartment models with asymptomatic infections go back at least to the work of Kemper in 1978 [33]. One may broadly distinguish between models that allow for a loss of immunity, and hence the approach to an endemic state, by including a transfer from the removed to the susceptible compartment [31,[33][34][35], and those that assume irreversible immunization [7,23,27,32,36,37]. To position our contribution within the latter body of work, it is useful to consider the following generalization of the model defined by equations ( 1)-( 4):…”