The Impact of Host-Based Early Warning on Disease Outbreaks

Mark Hernandez; Lauren E Milechin; Shakti K Davis; Rich DeLaura; Kajal T Claypool; Albert Swiston

The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not peer-reviewed) is the . https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.03.06.20029793 doi: medRxiv preprint incubation time of the suspected pathogen (often several weeks), they are released and re-enter the S compartment at a rate of ε (the inverse of the maximum incubation time). As shown in Figure 6 , the quarantine-all policy eliminates opportunities for further pathogen transmission; however, it also results in the quarantine of healthy individuals who have not been exposed, contributing to immense productivity losses, extreme logistic burdens associated with providing accommodations for an entire population, and acute civil rights concerns. Furthermore, the assumption that transmission is zero within the Q compartment may not be realistic because transmission for some pathogen may occur before overt symptoms and isolation. This quarantine-all policy could result in the illness of people who, if not for the quarantine, would never have been exposed to the pathogen. In the numeric solution for our SEIR Model with a quarantine-all policy enacted, the population of each compartment versus time, which notably does not include an exposed compartment, is shown in (a). In (a) are individuals suspected to be exposed and quarantined initially, until they either fall ill (and are isolated) or are released after the quarantine duration (21 days). The active working (S + R) and inactive (Q + L) populations versus time with the cumulative infections versus time are shown in (b). The quarantine-all policy has very effectively reduced the total number of disease cases but has vastly increased the burdens of quarantine and isolation.