Modeling the Comparative Impact of Individual Quarantine vs. Active Monitoring of Contacts for the Mitigation of COVID-19

Corey M Peak; Rebecca Kahn; Yonatan H Grad; Lauren M Childs; Ruoran Li; Marc Lipsitch; Caroline O Buckee

There may be such synergy in the data released by the WHO mission to China in February 2020. 17 In Guangdong, WHO reports that the proportion of fever clinic testing positive for SARS-CoV-2 declined from 0.47% on 30 January to 0.02% on 16 February, during a period of intensive social distancing interventions. 17 If one assumes that these social distancing interventions reduced transmission of nearly all infections that could cause attendance at a fever clinic, one might expect a lower total number of attendees, with proportionate declines in all infectious fever causes that are affected by social distancing. If one assumes that most fever causes are affected by social distancing, the declining proportion of SARS-CoV-2 among fever cases may reflect the benefits of interventions aimed specifically at this infection, which is to say case-based interventions like active monitoring, individual quarantine, and isolation.