Quantifying the Risk and Cost of Active Monitoring for Infectious Diseases

Nicholas G Reich; Justin Lessler; Jay K Varma; Neil M Vora

The number of serious infection events occurring in actively monitored individuals in NYC was small. None of the monitored individuals developed Ebola. The single Ebola case diagnosed in NYC occurred before active monitoring was implemented. We assumed that a small fraction of monitored individuals, 30 (or 0.6%), developed symptoms within the 21 day monitoring period that were serious enough to necessitate hospitalization at an institution in NYC to rule-out Ebola. At one hospital, Bellevue, it cost between $10,000-$30,000 per hospitalization to rule out Ebola in symptomatic, actively monitored individuals (John Maher, 6 . CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license is made available under a The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not peer-reviewed) is the author/funder.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/10.1101/156497 doi: bioRxiv preprint NYC Health and Hospitals, personal communication). This does not include the substantial infrastructural costs of creating and maintaining a special pathogens unit at the hospital.