The Impact of Contact Tracing and Household Bubbles on Deconfinement Strategies for COVID-19

Overview

Journal Nat Commun

Specialty Biology

Date 2021 Mar 22

PMID 33750778

Citations 43

Authors

Lander Willem

Steven Abrams

Pieter J K Libin

Pietro Coletti

Elise Kuylen

Oana Petrof

Signe Mogelmose

James Wambua

Sereina A Herzog

Christel Faes

Philippe Beutels

Niel Hens

Affiliations

Soon will be listed here.

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic caused many governments to impose policies restricting social interactions. A controlled and persistent release of lockdown measures covers many potential strategies and is subject to extensive scenario analyses. Here, we use an individual-based model (STRIDE) to simulate interactions between 11 million inhabitants of Belgium at different levels including extended household settings, i.e., "household bubbles". The burden of COVID-19 is impacted by both the intensity and frequency of physical contacts, and therefore, household bubbles have the potential to reduce hospital admissions by 90%. In addition, we find that it is crucial to complete contact tracing 4 days after symptom onset. Assumptions on the susceptibility of children affect the impact of school reopening, though we find that business and leisure-related social mixing patterns have more impact on COVID-19 associated disease burden. An optimal deployment of the mitigation policies under study require timely compliance to physical distancing, testing and self-isolation.

Citing Articles

Assessing the role of children in the COVID-19 pandemic in Belgium using perturbation analysis.

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Repetition in social contacts: implications in modelling the transmission of respiratory infectious diseases in pre-pandemic and pandemic settings.

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Addressing current limitations of household transmission studies by collecting contact data.

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The impact of quality-adjusted life years on evaluating COVID-19 mitigation strategies: lessons from age-specific vaccination roll-out and variants of concern in Belgium (2020-2022).

Willem L, Abrams S, Franco N, Coletti P, Libin P, Wambua J BMC Public Health. 2024; 24(1):1171.

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