COVID-19: when should quarantine be enforced?

• Published in: The Lancet Infectious Diseases Vol. 20; no. 9; pp. 994 - 995
• Main Authors: Bauch, Chris T, Anand, Madhur
• Format: Journal Article Web Resource
• Language: English
• Published: United States Elsevier Ltd 01.09.2020; Elsevier BV; Elsevier Limited
• Subjects: Betacoronavirus; Civil liberties; Comment; Contact tracing; Coronavirus Infections - epidemiology; Coronaviruses; COVID-19; Disease transmission; Economic impact; Economic models; Epidemics; Humans; Infectious diseases; Mathematical models; Pandemics; Pneumonia, Viral - epidemiology; Public health; Quarantine; SARS-CoV-2; Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2; Surveillance; Viral diseases; Viruses
• ISSN: 1473-3099; 1474-4457
• DOI: 10.1016/S1473-3099(20)30428-X

Aware of this dilemma, Peak and colleagues1 use a mathematical model of the early spread of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) infections to establish the conditions under which individual quarantine works better than active monitoring. [...]we think researchers should broaden their focus to developing models that explicitly include relevant social processes, equity considerations, and economic impacts in the model structure. Contact tracing represents a race to trace.8 To prevent exponential growth in the number of cases, public health must trace contacts of infected cases and reduce their chances of causing further spread faster than the virus propagates through the network of personal contacts. [...]intrusive action in the early stages of a pandemic might reduce how much longer those intrusive measures have to be applied, and to how many people.