Department of Zoology, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK.
Merton College, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK.
Nat Med. 2020 Oct;26(10):1616-1622. doi: 10.1038/s41591-020-1036-8. Epub 2020 Aug 7.
Case isolation and contact tracing can contribute to the control of COVID-19 outbreaks. However, it remains unclear how real-world social networks could influence the effectiveness and efficiency of such approaches. To address this issue, we simulated control strategies for SARS-CoV-2 transmission in a real-world social network generated from high-resolution GPS data that were gathered in the course of a citizen-science experiment. We found that tracing the contacts of contacts reduced the size of simulated outbreaks more than tracing of only contacts, but this strategy also resulted in almost half of the local population being quarantined at a single point in time. Testing and releasing non-infectious individuals from quarantine led to increases in outbreak size, suggesting that contact tracing and quarantine might be most effective as a 'local lockdown' strategy when contact rates are high. Finally, we estimated that combining physical distancing with contact tracing could enable epidemic control while reducing the number of quarantined individuals. Our findings suggest that targeted tracing and quarantine strategies would be most efficient when combined with other control measures such as physical distancing.
病例隔离和接触者追踪有助于控制 COVID-19 疫情的爆发。然而，目前尚不清楚现实世界中的社交网络如何影响这些方法的有效性和效率。为了解决这个问题，我们模拟了从高分辨率 GPS 数据中收集的公民科学实验过程中产生的真实社交网络中 SARS-CoV-2 传播的控制策略。我们发现，追踪接触者的接触者比仅追踪接触者更能减少模拟疫情的规模，但这种策略也导致当地近一半的人口在同一时间被隔离。测试并将非传染性个体从隔离中释放出来会导致疫情规模的增加，这表明接触者追踪和隔离可能在接触率较高时作为“局部封锁”策略最为有效。最后，我们估计，将物理隔离与接触者追踪相结合可以在减少隔离人数的同时控制疫情。我们的研究结果表明，有针对性的追踪和隔离策略与其他控制措施（如物理隔离）相结合时效率最高。
