May 5, 2021

Effect of Manual and Digital Contact Tracing on COVID-19 Outbreaks: A Study on Empirical Contact Data

Category: Article Summary

Topic: Modeling and Prediction

Keywords (Tags): contact tracing, modeling prediction

• A model assessing the impact of contact tracing on epidemic size reduction suggests that for manual contact tracing, as the fraction of contacts correctly recalled increases there are linear reductions in epidemic size while reductions were quadratically reduced with digital contact tracing via apps, as both case and contact need to be running the app. The benefit-to-cost ratio, as measured by the epidemic size reduction to number of quarantine ratio, of both contact tracing techniques are higher when the reproductive number is smaller.

Barrat et al. (May 5, 2021). Effect of Manual and Digital Contact Tracing on COVID-19 Outbreaks: A Study on Empirical Contact Data. Journal of The Royal Society Interface. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsif.2020.1000