Suppressing the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic using controlled testing and isolation

Abstract

The Corona virus disease has significantly affected lives of people around the world. Existing quarantine policies led to large-scale lock-downs because of the slow tracking of the infection paths, and indeed we see new waves of the disease. This can be solved by contact tracing combined with efficient testing policies. Since the number of daily tests is limited, it is crucial to exploit them efficiently to improve the outcome of contact tracing (technological or human-based epidemiological investigations). We develop a controlled testing framework to achieve this goal. The key is to test individuals with high probability of being infected to identify them before symptoms appear. These probabilities are updated based on contact tracing and test results. We demonstrate that the proposed method could reduce the quarantine and morbidity rates compared to existing methods by up to a 50%. The results clearly demonstrate the necessity of accelerating the epidemiological investigations by using technological contact tracing. Furthermore, proper use of the testing capacity using the proposed controlled testing methodology leads to significantly improved results under both small and large testing capacities. We also show that for small new outbreaks controlled testing can prevent the large spread of new waves. Author contributions statement: The authors contributed equally to this work, including conceptualization, analysis, methodology, software, and drafting the work.

Robust and Fragile Determinants of the Severity of Covid-19 in Developing and Developed Countries: A Comparative Analysis

“…Mercer and Salit (2021) argue that countries with high testing rates were able to control transmission effectively during the initial stages of the pandemic. Cohen and Leshem (2021) show that for small new outbreaks, controlled testing can prevent the large spread of new waves.…”

Compartmental Model for Epidemics with Contact Tracing and Isolation under Arbitrary Degree Distribution

“…In the recent COVID-19, we saw that implementing contact tracing and isolation techniques could be used to control the outbreak [23], [24], [25], [26], [27], [28], that is why in our research, we focused on incorporating quarantine and contact tracing into the classic SIR compartmental model under any arbitrary degree distribution. This grows more relevant in time as improve-ments in technology can help make contact tracing easier [29].…”

Post-acute sequelae of COVID-19 and longitudinal antibody levels in a community-based cohort

“…Today, the widespread use of vaccines, testing, and various public health strategies have helped to reduce the spread of SARS-CoV-2 [13][14][15][16][17][18]. COVID-19 vaccines have been particularly pivotal in curtailing the effects of the infection by reducing severe disease, hospitalization, and death [19][20][21][22][23].…”