Alliance for Pandemic Preparedness

June 30, 2020

A Modelling Study for Designing a Multi-Layered Surveillance Approach to Detect the Potential Resurgence of SARS-CoV-2

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  • [pre-print, not peer-reviewed] Liu et al. explored RT-PCR testing–based surveillance strategies for COVID-19 containment in Beijing, China. This study assumed that all healthcare workers, hospital patients, and community members with clinical illness would be captured either at fever clinics or in respiratory departments in hospitals. Fever clinics are telephone-based triage systems combined with drive-through testing that were originally established in China during the 2003 SARS epidemic.  
  • The authors found that fever clinics had the highest surveillance sensitivity. Their model suggests that with exclusively testing at fever clinics, at the time of the first positive RT-PCR surveillance test result there would be only 598 undetected SARS-CoV-2 cases in the population. They also found that outbreak detection can occur earlier by including asymptomatic subgroups, such as younger adults in the community, as broader testing capacity becomes available. 

Liu et al. (June 29, 2020). A Modelling Study for Designing a Multi-Layered Surveillance Approach to Detect the Potential Resurgence of SARS-CoV-2. Pre-print downloaded June 30 from https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.06.27.20141440