A New Measure for Assessing the Public Health Response to a Middle East Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus Outbreak

Cho, Sung-il

In the Korean MERS-CoV epidemic, important super-spreading events occurred. A sufficiently high TQP could have prevented many of these events. To maintain a high TQP, extensive monitoring is needed for a wider range of possible contacts, which may be costly. A reasonable cost-benefit analysis may be performed by examining the trade-off between the scope of monitoring and the effect of such efforts, and the TQP may provide a tool for such an assessment. Further studies including empirical data analysis are needed to elaborate the characteristics and utility of the TQP. We assumed in this paper that TC is the most adequate time for monitoring, but this needs to be validated by empirical data. Any new evidence that supports the presence of infectivity during the incubation period or absence of infectivity in the early symptomatic period needs to be taken into account. More generally, TQP may be defined for different time points, TC, TS, and TD, and the effectiveness of quarantine may be compared among the alternatives.