The effects of border control and quarantine measures on global spread of COVID-19

M. Pear Hossain; Alvin Junus; Xiaolin Zhu; Pengfei Jia; Tzai-Hung Wen; Dirk Pfeiffer; Hsiang-Yu Yuan

(which was not peer-reviewed) The copyright holder for this preprint . https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.03.13.20035261 doi: medRxiv preprint control and quarantine measures. Surprisingly, under the higher R 0 setting (2.92), the effect on obtaining 10 extra days requires an enhanced border control measure to reduce more than 90% of the passengers or a very 297 efficient quarantine measure. The results suggest that if the epidemic growth at the source location is high, even 298 a near full-scale border control without proper quarantine measure, will have only limited effects. The 299 transmission waves can be treated as a branching process. However, instead of using the offspring variability to 300 estimate the probability of extinction, we adopted a classical way to derive probability of extinction that was 301 based on R 0 or effective R.