Abstract
High quality daily testing for the presence of the SARS-CoV-2 in workplace settings has become part of the standard and mandatory protection measures implemented widely in response to the current pandemic. Such tests are often limited to a small fraction of the attending personnel due to cost considerations, limited availability and processing capabilities and the often cumbersome requirements of the test itself. A maximally efficient use of such an important and frequently scarce resource is clearly required. We here present an optimal testing strategy which minimises the presence of pre-symptomatic and asymptomatic infected members of the population in a workplace setting, derived under a series of simplifying statistical assumptions. These assumptions however, retain many of the generalities of the problem and yield robust results, as verified through a number of numerical simulations. We show that reduction in overall infected-person-days, IPD, by significant percentages can be achieved, for fixed numbers of tests per day of 5% and 10% of the population, of 30% and 50% in the IPD numbers, respectively.
Highlights
Within the context of the present COVID-19 pandemic, it has become clear that far, the most efficient strategy towards reducing the spread of the disease includes strict social distancing rules, reinforcing basic hygiene measures and the imposition of lockdown policies on the part of local and national governments
We have presented a local epidemiological model where the average infection rate is assumed as determined by the overall infection rate of a global population of which the local model represents a fair sample
To use a physical analogy, standard epidemiological models, e.g. of the S-I-R type, aim at tracking the evolution of the infection rate over an entire population, with derived proposed interventions aimed at reducing the overall spread and duration of the epidemic, see for example [17] for a treatment of an optimal sampling and testing strategy for the general population
Summary
Within the context of the present COVID-19 pandemic, it has become clear that far, the most efficient strategy towards reducing the spread of the disease includes strict social distancing rules, reinforcing basic hygiene measures and the imposition of lockdown policies on the part of local and national governments This last must clearly be tempered by the obvious need to keep essential workplace facilities operating. Examples of the above include hospitals, energy production facilities, food production and distribution infrastructure, and pharmaceutical industries, to mention but a handful of the most obvious such cases Continual operation of such facilities has firstly included the adoption of safety and hygiene protocols during working days, and crucially, strict Sanitary Checkpoints, protocols for the daily entrance of persons attending. Sanitary Checkpoints (SC) serve the purpose of identifying symptomatic individuals which can be tested directly for the virus, or in any case, sent home for a certain safety period.
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