Kim Jungyeol, Chen Xingran, Nikpey Hesam, Rubin Harvey, Saeedi Bidokhti Shirin, Sarkar Saswati
Department of Electrical and Systems Engineering, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA.
Department of Computer and Information Science, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA.
R Soc Open Sci. 2022 Oct 12;9(10):211927. doi: 10.1098/rsos.211927. eCollection 2022 Oct.
Traditional contact tracing tests the direct contacts of those who test positive. But, by the time an infected individual is tested, the infection starting from the person may have infected a chain of individuals. Hence, why should the testing stop at direct contacts, and not test secondary, tertiary contacts or even contacts further down? One deterrent in testing long chains of individuals right away may be that it substantially increases the testing load, or does it? We investigate the costs and benefits of such multi-hop contact tracing for different number of hops. Considering diverse contact networks, we show that the cost-benefit trade-off can be characterized in terms of a single measurable attribute, the . Once this growth rate crosses a threshold, multi-hop contact tracing substantially reduces the outbreak size compared with traditional tracing. Multi-hop even incurs a lower cost compared with the traditional tracing for a large range of values of the growth rate. The cost-benefit trade-offs can be classified into three phases depending on the value of the growth rate. The need for choosing a larger number of hops becomes greater as the growth rate increases or the environment becomes less conducive toward containing the disease.
传统的接触者追踪检测的是检测呈阳性者的直接接触者。但是，当一个感染者接受检测时，从该人开始的感染可能已经感染了一连串的人。那么，为什么检测要止于直接接触者，而不检测二代、三代接触者甚至更下游的接触者呢？立即对长长的接触者链条进行检测的一个阻碍可能是这会大幅增加检测负担，真的是这样吗？我们研究了不同跳数的这种多跳接触者追踪的成本和收益。考虑到不同的接触网络，我们表明成本效益权衡可以用一个单一的可衡量属性，即 来表征。一旦这个增长率超过一个阈值，与传统追踪相比，多跳接触者追踪能大幅减小疫情规模。在很大范围的增长率值下，多跳追踪甚至比传统追踪成本更低。根据增长率的值，成本效益权衡可以分为三个阶段。随着增长率增加或环境对控制疾病变得不那么有利，选择更大跳数的需求就变得更大。
