Abstract
The international community has been put in an unprecedented situation by the COVID-19 pandemic. Creating models to describe and quantify alternative mitigation strategies becomes increasingly urgent. In this study, we propose an agent-based model of disease transmission in a society divided into closely connected families, workplaces, and social groups. This allows us to discuss mitigation strategies, including targeted quarantine measures. We find that workplace and more diffuse social contacts are roughly equally important to disease spread, and that an effective lockdown must target both. We examine the cost–benefit of replacing a lockdown with tracing and quarantining contacts of the infected. Quarantine can contribute substantially to mitigation, even if it has short duration and is done within households. When reopening society, testing and quarantining is a strategy that is much cheaper in terms of lost workdays than a long lockdown. A targeted quarantine strategy is quite efficient with only 5 days of quarantine, and its effect increases when testing is more widespread.
Highlights
The international community has been put in an unprecedented situation by the COVID-19 pandemic
The 2020 coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has raised the need for mitigation efforts that could reduce the peak of the epidemic[1,2]
We have developed an agent-based epidemiological model which takes into account that disease transmission happens in distinct arenas of social life that each play a different role under lockdown: The family, the workplace, our social circles, and the public sphere
Summary
Our proposed model divides social life into family life which accounts for 40% of all social interactions, work life accounting for 30%, social life in fixed friend groups accounting for 15%, and public life which accounts for another 15%3. We will here implement a crude form of contact tracing where we (1) close the workplaces of people who are tested positive for the disease, (2) isolate their regular social contacts for a limited period, and (3) keep symptomatic individuals in quarantine until they recover. An average person will stay around 12 days in quarantine during the course of the epidemic with a testing probability of 10% per day This time can be reduced if people can be convinced of smaller work environments and fewer face-to-face contacts per week. The effect does not increase with a longer quarantine period, but the cost is substantially larger
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