Estimating cost-benefit of quarantine length for Covid-19 mitigation

Andreas Eilersen; Kim Sneppen

The main cost of the quarantine option is the quarantine time. Figure 3 (d) examines the efficiency versus cost of as a function of quarantine length. It can be seen that there is little gain in extending the quarantine period beyond the 5-day duration of the incubation period. For this reason we opted for 5 days in quarantine in panel (a,b). As a consequence, an average person will stay around 5 days in quarantine during the course of the epidemics with a testing efficiency of 2 % . This time can be reduced if people can convinced of smaller work environments and fewer physical contact per week. Fragmentation of our networks into smaller groups will reduce both quarantine overhead and the direct transmission of the disease (Fig. 2(b) , orange curve).