The Effectiveness of Contact Tracing in Emerging Epidemics

Klinkenberg, Don; Fraser, Christophe; Heesterbeek, Hans

We study an epidemic in its initial phase and use a branching process for its description, which means that the epidemic can be regarded as a growing tree. Each branch (contact) connects two nodes (contactees) with a hierarchical relation, the infector having infected the infectee. If one of the contactees is notified as being infected, by becoming symptomatic or by being traced via a secondary contact, the contact is traced with a probability p c (all parameters and functions of the model are given in Table 1 ). Each contact may be traced only once, either from infector to infectee (forwards tracing) or from infectee to infector (backwards tracing), so its traceability can be determined at the time of transmission. Thus, infection trees with traceable and untraceable contacts arise (Figure 1 ).