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

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

The recent SARS and Ebola epidemics highlighted that hospital isolation does not always contain transmission; we therefore allow isolation effectiveness (γ) to vary to reflect different settings (17, 26, 27) . The fraction of contacts who are traced (PCT) can be less than 1, encompassing symptomatic infectors who fail to recall contacts, asymptomatic "silent" infection events, reluctance to report contacts, and challenges in identifying contacts, especially for airborne transmission routes. Imperfections and uncertainties in risk profiling can reduce the fraction of traced contacts that are truly infected (PINF) (16, 20) . Delays in tracing a contact (DCT) can arise for numerous reasons, including intractable roads, low mobile phone penetration, and personnel limitations. The delay between symptom onset and isolation (DSM) specifically applies to individuals under symptom . CC-BY-ND 4.0 International license is made available under a The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not peer-reviewed) is the author/funder.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 monitoring and is influenced by the frequency of monitoring, delays in recognizing sometimes unreliable clinical features, and delays in prompt isolation upon symptom detection. Intervention performance parameter examples can be found in Table 1 .