Modeling quarantine during epidemics by mass-testing with drones

Leonid Sedov; Alexander Krasnochub; valentin polishchuk

Recent advances in the drone (unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAV) technology allow one to perform unmanned delivery-to-the-door of various goods [SNTWN19] . Drones succeed with blood transportation [AHSW+17, ANTBS17, ASPHS15, GRPS+14, KCMG+18] (and even organ transportation is being explored [SRSBBW18] ), implying that transporting by drones the less sensitive [WHO20] COVID-19 test samples (e.g, upper respiratory specimens in nasopharyngeal and oropharyngeal swab or lower respiratory specimens like sputum) may also be technically feasible [ASCMZ16] (related studies went so far as to explore testing for avian influenza A (H7N9) virus directly on the drone [WF06] ). This opens the potential to use drones for mass-testing the population for COVID-19, most importantly --including asymptomatic people --it has been reported that symptomless people can be infectious as well [BYWT+20 FLNI+20, GV'14, HSXJ+20, NKMS+20] (in fact, since symptomatic people were advised to isolate very early, it may be the case that the pandemic occurred mostly due to asymptomatic transmission [LPCS+20] ). In particular, if the infected but asymptomatic people become infectious after D=4 days from being infected [FLNI+20] , then (assuming the tests can determine that a person is infectious starting from day 0 of the infection) quarantining everyone within 4 days of the infection could stop asymptomatic COVID-19 spread altogether (assuming responsible behavior of self-quarantining from the asymptomatic people who received positive test results). We estimate that for a medium-size city with ~100000 inhabitants (Norrköping, Sweden --our guinea pig), 36 Switzerland Matternet [SM] drones (each carrying 100 tests) suffice to visit everyone (distributing, collecting and returning the tests to the lab) once every 4 days --see . CC-BY 4.0 International license It is made available under a author/funder, who has granted medRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity.