Sideward contact tracing and the control of epidemics in large gatherings.
J R Soc Interface
; 19(190): 20220048, 2022 05.
Article
in English
| MEDLINE | ID: covidwho-1831585
ABSTRACT
Effective contact tracing is crucial to containing epidemic spreading without disrupting societal activities, especially during a pandemic. Large gatherings play a key role, potentially favouring superspreading events. However, the effects of tracing in large groups have not been fully assessed so far. We show that in addition to forward tracing, which reconstructs to whom the disease spreads, and backward tracing, which searches from whom the disease spreads, a third 'sideward' tracing is always present, when tracing gatherings. This is an indirect tracing that detects infected asymptomatic individuals, even if they have been neither directly infected by nor directly transmitted the infection to the index case. We analyse this effect in a model of epidemic spreading for SARS-CoV-2, within the framework of simplicial activity-driven temporal networks. We determine the contribution of the three tracing mechanisms to the suppression of epidemic spreading, showing that sideward tracing induces a non-monotonic behaviour in the tracing efficiency, as a function of the size of the gatherings. Based on our results, we suggest an optimal choice for the sizes of the gatherings to be traced and we test the strategy on an empirical dataset of gatherings on a university campus.
Keywords
Full text:
Available
Collection:
International databases
Database:
MEDLINE
Main subject:
Epidemics
/
COVID-19
Type of study:
Diagnostic study
/
Experimental Studies
/
Observational study
/
Randomized controlled trials
Limits:
Humans
Language:
English
Journal:
J R Soc Interface
Year:
2022
Document Type:
Article
Affiliation country:
Rsif.2022.0048
Similar
MEDLINE
...
LILACS
LIS