Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering, Kansas State University, Manhattan, KS, USA.
Sci Rep. 2021 Mar 1;11(1):4891. doi: 10.1038/s41598-021-83722-y.
Contact tracing can play a key role in controlling human-to-human transmission of a highly contagious disease such as COVID-19. We investigate the benefits and costs of contact tracing in the COVID-19 transmission. We estimate two unknown epidemic model parameters (basic reproductive number [Formula: see text] and confirmed rate [Formula: see text]) by using confirmed case data. We model contact tracing in a two-layer network model. The two-layer network is composed by the contact network in the first layer and the tracing network in the second layer. In terms of benefits, simulation results show that increasing the fraction of traced contacts decreases the size of the epidemic. For example, tracing [Formula: see text] of the contacts is enough for any reopening scenario to reduce the number of confirmed cases by half. Considering the act of quarantining susceptible households as the contact tracing cost, we have observed an interesting phenomenon. The number of quarantined susceptible people increases with the increase of tracing because each individual confirmed case is mentioning more contacts. However, after reaching a maximum point, the number of quarantined susceptible people starts to decrease with the increase of tracing because the increment of the mentioned contacts is balanced by a reduced number of confirmed cases. The goal of this research is to assess the effectiveness of contact tracing for the containment of COVID-19 spreading in the different movement levels of a rural college town in the USA. Our research model is designed to be flexible and therefore, can be used to other geographic locations.
接触者追踪在控制高度传染性疾病（如 COVID-19）的人际传播方面可以发挥关键作用。我们研究了接触者追踪在 COVID-19 传播中的收益和成本。我们通过确诊病例数据来估计两个未知的流行模型参数（基本繁殖数[Formula: see text]和确诊率[Formula: see text]）。我们在两层网络模型中对接触者追踪进行建模。两层网络由第一层的接触网络和第二层的追踪网络组成。在收益方面，模拟结果表明，增加被追踪接触者的比例可以减少疫情的规模。例如，追踪[Formula: see text]的接触者足以使任何重新开放的场景将确诊病例数量减少一半。考虑到将易感家庭隔离作为接触者追踪的成本，我们观察到了一个有趣的现象。被隔离的易感人数随着追踪的增加而增加，因为每个确诊病例都会提到更多的接触者。然而，在达到一个最大值后，被隔离的易感人数开始随着追踪的增加而减少，因为提到的接触者数量的增加被确诊病例数量的减少所平衡。本研究的目的是评估接触者追踪在控制美国农村大学城不同流动水平的 COVID-19 传播方面的有效性。我们的研究模型旨在具有灵活性，因此可以用于其他地理位置。
