Bidirectional contact tracing could dramatically improve COVID-19 control

William J. Bradshaw, Ethan C. Alley, Jonathan H. Huggins, Alun L. Lloyd and Kevin M. Esvelt ()
Additional contact information
William J. Bradshaw: Max Planck Institute for Biology of Ageing
Ethan C. Alley: Alt. Technology Labs
Jonathan H. Huggins: Boston University
Alun L. Lloyd: North Carolina State University
Kevin M. Esvelt: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Nature Communications, 2021, vol. 12, issue 1, 1-9

Abstract: Abstract Contact tracing is critical to controlling COVID-19, but most protocols only “forward-trace” to notify people who were recently exposed. Using a stochastic branching-process model, we find that “bidirectional” tracing to identify infector individuals and their other infectees robustly improves outbreak control. In our model, bidirectional tracing more than doubles the reduction in effective reproduction number (Reff) achieved by forward-tracing alone, while dramatically increasing resilience to low case ascertainment and test sensitivity. The greatest gains are realised by expanding the manual tracing window from 2 to 6 days pre-symptom-onset or, alternatively, by implementing high-uptake smartphone-based exposure notification; however, to achieve the performance of the former approach, the latter requires nearly all smartphones to detect exposure events. With or without exposure notification, our results suggest that implementing bidirectional tracing could dramatically improve COVID-19 control.

Date: 2021
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-20325-7 Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:12:y:2021:i:1:d:10.1038_s41467-020-20325-7

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-020-20325-7

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().