Institute of Science and Technology Austria, Klosterneuburg, Austria.
Chair for Network Dynamics, Center for Advancing Electronics Dresden (cfaed), Institute for Theoretical Physics and Center of Excellence Physics of Life, Technical University of Dresden, Dresden, Germany.
Nat Commun. 2021 May 10;12(1):2586. doi: 10.1038/s41467-021-22725-9.
High impact epidemics constitute one of the largest threats humanity is facing in the 21 century. In the absence of pharmaceutical interventions, physical distancing together with testing, contact tracing and quarantining are crucial in slowing down epidemic dynamics. Yet, here we show that if testing capacities are limited, containment may fail dramatically because such combined countermeasures drastically change the rules of the epidemic transition: Instead of continuous, the response to countermeasures becomes discontinuous. Rather than following the conventional exponential growth, the outbreak that is initially strongly suppressed eventually accelerates and scales faster than exponential during an explosive growth period. As a consequence, containment measures either suffice to stop the outbreak at low total case numbers or fail catastrophically if marginally too weak, thus implying large uncertainties in reliably estimating overall epidemic dynamics, both during initial phases and during second wave scenarios.
高影响力的传染病是 21 世纪人类面临的最大威胁之一。在缺乏药物干预的情况下，物理隔离以及检测、接触者追踪和隔离对于减缓疫情动态至关重要。然而，我们在这里表明，如果检测能力有限，遏制措施可能会失败，因为这些综合措施会极大地改变疫情转变的规则：疫情反应不再是连续的，而是不连续的。疫情不是遵循传统的指数增长，而是在爆发期内加速并呈爆炸式增长，超过指数增长。因此，如果遏制措施不够强，要么不足以阻止疫情在总病例数较低的情况下爆发，要么就会灾难性地失败，这意味着在疫情的初始阶段和第二波疫情场景中，可靠地估计总体疫情动态存在很大的不确定性。
