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  4. Quantifying the Effects of Contact Tracing, Testing, and Containment Measures in the Presence of Infection Hotspots
 
working paper

Quantifying the Effects of Contact Tracing, Testing, and Containment Measures in the Presence of Infection Hotspots

Lorch, Lars
•
Kremer, Heiner
•
Trouleau, William  
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April 15, 2020

Multiple lines of evidence at the individual and population level strongly suggest that infection hotspots, or superspreading events, where a single individual infects many others, play a key role in the transmission dynamics of COVID-19. However, most of the existing epidemiological models either assume or result in a Poisson distribution of the number of infections caused by a single infectious individual, often called secondary infections. As a result, these models overlook the observed overdispersion in the number of secondary infections and are unable to accurately characterize infection hotspots. In this work, we aim to fill this gap by introducing a temporal point process framework that explicitly represents sites where infection hotspots may occur. Under our model, overdispersion on the number of secondary infections emerges naturally. Moreover, using an efficient sampling algorithm, we demonstrate how to apply Bayesian optimization with longitudinal case data to estimate the transmission rate of infectious individuals at sites they visit and in their households, as well as the mobility reduction due to social distancing. Simulations using fine-grained demographic data and site locations from several cities and regions demonstrate that our framework faithfully characterizes the observed longitudinal trend of COVID-19 cases. In addition, the simulations show that our model can be used to estimate the effect of testing, contact tracing, and containment at an unprecedented spatiotemporal resolution, and reveal that these measures do not decrease overdispersion in the number of secondary infections.

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Type
working paper
Author(s)
Lorch, Lars
Kremer, Heiner
Trouleau, William  
Tsirtsis, Stratis
Szanto, Aron
Schölkopf, Bernhard
Gomez-Rodriguez, Manuel
Date Issued

2020-04-15

Subjects

Machine Learning

•

Social and Information Networks

•

Physics and Society

•

Populations and Evolution

•

epidemics

•

distributed processes on graphs

URL

code

https://github.com/covid19-model

arXiv

https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.07641
Editorial or Peer reviewed

NON-REVIEWED

Written at

EPFL

EPFL units
INDY1  
INDY2  
Available on Infoscience
April 17, 2020
Use this identifier to reference this record
https://infoscience.epfl.ch/handle/20.500.14299/168236
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