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THE BENEFITS OF ENHANCED CONTACT TRACING AND QUARANTINE TO RESUME AND MAINTAIN COLLEGE‐CAMPUS OPERATIONS: AN AGENT‐BASED PROABLISTIC SIMULATION ANALYSIS
Author(s) -
Bashatah Jomana A.,
Sherry Lance,
Roess Amira
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
incose international symposium
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 2334-5837
DOI - 10.1002/j.2334-5837.2021.00888.x
Subject(s) - contact tracing , quarantine , isolation (microbiology) , asymptomatic , cohort , pandemic , social distance , business , outbreak , medicine , emergency medicine , covid-19 , virology , surgery , infectious disease (medical specialty) , biology , disease , pathology , microbiology and biotechnology
Universities, K‐12 schools, sports programs, and businesses are operating (and generating revenue) during the COVID‐19 pandemic. The key to operating safely is to manage the risk of infectious events that lead to an outbreak and require excess costs and/or lead to a complete shutdown of the enterprise. To operate through a pandemic, organizations must plan to accommodate the quarantine of exposed individuals and isolation of infected individuals (e.g. accommodations and food). To prevent or slow infections, organizations can implement mitigation options to: (1) reduce peer‐to‐peer transmission in operations (e.g. social distancing and protective equipment), (2) identify and quarantine individuals who have been exposed (e.g. daily symptom and exposure screening, randomized surveillance testing, timely contact tracing), and (3) test and/or isolate individuals who are infected (asymptomatic as well as symptomatic). Mitigation option #1 prevents individuals from becoming infected. Mitigation options #2 and #3 remove people who are infected from circulation, preventing them from infecting others. The efficacy of mitigations #2 and #3 have a non‐linear impact due to the amplifying effect of circulating asymptomatic/symptomatic individuals. An agent‐based, probabilistic model measured the efficacy of contact tracing and quarantine on infection counts and lost productivity (i.e. total days in quarantine and isolation). Two modes of operations were evaluated: Cohort with no interaction with the community (i.e. hermetically sealed “bubble” with one undetected infection at start), Cohort with limited interaction with community (e.g. attending classes, take‐out food court). For the No Community Interaction cohort, a contact tracing and quarantine with only 25% efficacy and compliance reduced the infection count from 60% to 6%. This yielded a reduction in total lost productivity days of 94%. In contrast, the Limited Community Interaction cohort required more than 75% efficacy and compliance in contact tracing and quarantine to reduce the infection count from 80% to 30%. This yielded a reduction in total lost productivity days of 30%. These results highlight the role interaction with the general community has on a cohort's health. Further, the results emphasize the utility of contact tracing and quarantine within a cohort to mitigate community‐wide practices that are not under jurisdiction of managers of the enterprise. The implications of these results and limitations of the model are discussed.