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Tracing potentially infected contacts of confirmed cases is important whenfighting outbreaks of many infectious diseases. The COVID-19 pandemic hasmotivated researchers to examine how different contact tracing strategiescompare in terms of effectiveness (ability to mitigate infections) and costefficiency (number of prevented infections per isolation). Two importantstrategies are so-called forward contact tracing (tracing to whom diseasespreads) and backward contact tracing (tracing from whom disease spreads).Recently, Kojaku and colleagues reported that backward contact tracing was``profoundly more effective'' than forward contact tracing, that contacttracing effectiveness ``hinges on reaching the `source' of infection'', andthat contact tracing outperformed case isolation in terms of cost efficiency.Here we show that these conclusions are not true in general. They were based inpart on simulations that vastly overestimated the effectiveness and efficiencyof contact tracing. Our results show that the efficiency of contact tracingstrategies is highly contextual; faced with a disease outbreak, the diseasedynamics determine whether tracing infection sources or new cases is moreimpactful. Our results also demonstrate the importance of simulating diseasespread and mitigation measures in parallel rather than sequentially.

Comparing the efficiency of forward and backward contact tracing