Containing Emerging Epidemics: a Quantitative Comparison of Quarantine and Symptom Monitoring

Corey M Peak; Lauren M Childs; Yonatan H Grad; Caroline O Buckee

The comparative effectiveness of quarantine and symptom monitoring is strongly influenced by differences in the infection's natural history. We measured partial rank correlation coefficients to examine which biological characteristics in particular are most influential after controlling for the other characteristics (Methods). As demonstrated by strongly negative partial rank correlation coefficients in Fig 4, increasing the duration of infectiousness ( !"# ) and elongating the latent period ( !""#$% ) reduced the differences between quarantine and symptom monitoring, thereby making the interventions more The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not peer-reviewed) is the author/funder. It . https://doi.org/10.1101/072652 doi: bioRxiv preprint similar. Other factors, such as overdispersed heterogeneity of the basic reproductive number ( ), did not influence the average effect of symptom monitoring and quarantine, as reflected by a coefficient of nearly zero. However, at a given effective reproductive number, overdispersion does decrease the average number of generations until extinction, as predicted (Fig S2) (18) . Longer incubation periods (TINC) increased the preference for quarantine, as seen by the positive partial rank correlation coefficient for both absolute and relative comparative effectiveness. However, the length of the incubation period does not generally influence comparative effectiveness per quarantine day because the number of days in quarantine ( ! ) increases as the incubation period lengthens (Fig S3) .