November 6, 2020

Implication of Backward Contact Tracing in the Presence of Overdispersed Transmission in COVID-19 Outbreaks

Category: Article Summary

Topic: Modeling and Prediction

Keywords (Tags): modeling prediction, non-pharm interventions

• Identification of the source of newly-detected SARS-CoV-2 infections (“backward contact tracing”), was found to be a potentially effective outbreak control measure. Endo et. al used a simple branching process model and found that backward tracing was expected to identify a primary case generating 3-10 times more infections than average, which could increase the proportion of subsequent cases averted by a factor of 2-3. In the study, the estimated number of cases avoided by backward contact tracing increased as overdispersion increased suggesting that backward contact tracing may be especially effective in situations where there is high individual variation in the number of secondary transmissions

Endo et al. (Oct 13, 2020). Implication of Backward Contact Tracing in the Presence of Overdispersed Transmission in COVID-19 Outbreaks. Wellcome Open Research. https://doi.org/10.12688/wellcomeopenres.16344.1