The impact of contact tracing and household bubbles on deconfinement strategies for COVID-19

The COVID-19 pandemic caused many governments to impose policies restricting social interactions. A controlled and persistent release of lockdown measures covers many potential strategies and is subject to extensive scenario analyses. Here, we use an individual-based model (STRIDE) to simulate interactions between 11 million inhabitants of Belgium at different levels including extended household settings, i.e., “household bubbles”. The burden of COVID-19 is impacted by both the intensity and frequency of physical contacts, and therefore, household bubbles have the potential to reduce hospital admissions by 90%. In addition, we find that it is crucial to complete contact tracing 4 days after symptom onset. Assumptions on the susceptibility of children affect the impact of school reopening, though we find that business and leisure-related social mixing patterns have more impact on COVID-19 associated disease burden. An optimal deployment of the mitigation policies under study require timely compliance to physical distancing, testing and self-isolation.

Abstract licence: CC BY-NC-ND

1. 7.

   Estimating the impact of school closure on social mixing behaviour and the transmission of close contact infections in eight European countries · 2009

2. 11.

   Behavioural change models for infectious disease transmission: a systematic review (2010–2015) · 2016

3. 18.

   Incubation period of 2019 novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) infections among travellers from Wuhan, China, 20–28 January 2020 · 2020

4. 22.

   Substantial undocumented infection facilitates the rapid dissemination of novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) · 2020

5. 24.

   Challenges in control of COVID-19: short doubling time and long delay to effect of interventions · 2021

6. 25.

   Commentary on Ferguson, et al., “Impact of Non-pharmaceutical Interventions (NPIs) to Reduce COVID-19 Mortality and Healthcare Demand” · 2020

7. 30.

   Estimating the generation interval for coronavirus disease (COVID-19) based on symptom onset data, March 2020 · 2020

8. 34.

   Effectiveness of isolation, testing, contact tracing, and physical distancing on reducing transmission of SARS-CoV-2 in different settings: a mathematical modelling study · 2020

9. 35.

   Efficacy of contact tracing for the containment of the 2019 novel coronavirus (COVID-19) · 2020

31 more references, whose wording the paper’s licence keeps private.

A person counts once a day per paper. We keep no cookie and no address: a reader is a hash that changes every day. Any month under five reads shows no number.