The Effectiveness of Targeted Quarantine for Minimising Impact of COVID-19

Alastair D Jamieson-Lane; Eric Cytrnbaum

Derivation of this expression is given in the Appendix. Figure 4 verifies this expression for a variety of κ × values by comparing equation 5 to the results of full scale SIR simulation. While complicated at first glance, equation 5 provides two key insights: firstly, we observe that all reductions in cross quarantine contact rate, κ × , lead to a corresponding reduction in infections -halving κ × will (approximately) halve the number of quarantined individuals getting infected. Secondly, we observe the importance of keeping κ Q well below the epidemic threshold. So long as γ βκ Q N q /N , quarantine measures are strict enough to prevent selfsustaining chains of infection in the quarantine population and κ Q has only 1 https://github.com/alastair-JL/COVID strategy 5 . 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.