Modeling the Comparative Impact of Individual Quarantine vs. Active Monitoring of Contacts for the Mitigation of COVID-19

Corey M Peak; Rebecca Kahn; Yonatan H Grad; Lauren M Childs; Ruoran Li; Marc Lipsitch; Caroline O Buckee

The effectiveness of individual quarantine versus active monitoring, targeted by contact tracing, heavily depends on the assumptions regarding the serial interval, the amount of transmission that occurs prior to symptom onset, and the feasibility setting. Under our fitted disease natural history parameters for serial interval scenario 1, with a shorter mean serial interval and hence substantial presymptomatic infectiousness, individual quarantine was considerably more effective than active monitoring at reducing onward transmission by an infected contact. To offset this relative benefit of individual quarantine compared to active monitoring, perverse incentives to avoid quarantine would have to be correspondingly larger. Both scenarios were fit using an incubation period with mean = 5.2 days among 451 lab-confirmed cases from Wuhan; 12 other recent estimates of the incubation period of COVID-19 include a mean of 6.4 7 . 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.