Determination and estimation of optimal quarantine duration for infectious diseases with application to data analysis of COVID‐19

Wang, Ruoyu; Wang, Qihua

Quarantine measure is a commonly used nonpharmaceutical intervention during the outbreak of infectious diseases. A key problem for implementing quarantine measure is to determine the duration of the quarantine. Different from the existing methods that determine a constant quarantine duration for everyone, we develop an individualized quarantine rule that suggests different quarantine durations for individuals with different characteristics. The proposed quarantine rule is optimal in the sense that it minimizes the average quarantine duration of uninfected people with the constraint that the probability of symptom presentation for infected people attains the given value closing to 1. The optimal solution for the quarantine duration is obtained and estimated by some statistical methods with application to analyzing COVID‐19 data.