The Effectiveness of Contact Tracing in Emerging Epidemics

Klinkenberg, Don; Fraser, Christophe; Heesterbeek, Hans

In our model we only regarded transmission of the infection before tracing or isolation, allowing us to focus on the characteristics of the contact tracing itself. Regarding the control of animal disease epidemics, e.g. foot-and-mouth disease or avian influenza, it is not unreasonable to assume that there will be no other transmission: all infected and suspected farms will be culled and they really will stop being infectious. However, with human infections it is very likely that isolation and quarantine will be less effective. This results in a complicated situation, because transmission will not only be reduced after detection, the contact structure will also change, with only a limited number of people (health-care workers) having contact with multiple isolated patients. For the case of SARS, a more detailed model on exactly this aspect was studied by Lloyd-Smith et al [5] , who indeed concluded that minimizing within-hospital transmission might be crucial, especially if tracing and isolation occur rather slowly. Further studies are required for this complex problem. The present paper provides a good understanding of the principles of contact tracing, and how infectious disease characteristics determine the effectiveness.