ArticleRoyal Society open science2021
A renewal equation model to assess roles and limitations of contact tracing for disease outbreak control.
Article in Royal Society open science, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 11 papers.
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Who cites it
11 citing papers in PubMed, 28 citations in OpenAlex.
- Mathematical Contact Tracing Models for the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Systematic Review of the Literature.Healthcare (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Review
- The optimal spatially-dependent control measures to effectively and economically eliminate emerging infectious diseases.PLoS computational biology · 2024Article
- A mathematical model to assess the effectiveness of test-trace-isolate-and-quarantine under limited capacities.PloS one · 2024Article
- Individual level analysis of digital proximity tracing for COVID-19 in Belgium highlights major bottlenecks.Nature communications · 2023Article
- Estimating SARS-CoV-2 variant fitness and the impact of interventions in England using statistical and geo-spatial agent-based models.Philosophical transactions. Series A, Mathematical, physical, and engineering sciences · 2022Article
- Empirical evidence on the efficiency of backward contact tracing in COVID-19.Nature communications · 2022Article
- The importance of the generation interval in investigating dynamics and control of new SARS-CoV-2 variants.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2022Article
- Modelling preventive measures and their effect on generation times in emerging epidemics.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2022Article
- Challenges for modelling interventions for future pandemics.Epidemics · 2022Article
- On the use of aggregated human mobility data to estimate the reproduction number.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- Effectiveness of isolation measures with app support to contain COVID-19 epidemics: a parametric approach.Journal of mathematical biology · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors at 4 institutions in 3 countries.
Funding
Abstract
We propose a deterministic model capturing essential features of contact tracing as part of public health non-pharmaceutical interventions to mitigate an outbreak of an infectious disease. By incorporating a mechanistic formulation of the processes at the individual level, we obtain an integral equation (delayed in calendar time and advanced in time since infection) for the probability that an infected individual is detected and isolated at any point in time. This is then coupled with a renewal equation for the total incidence to form a closed system describing the transmission dynamics involving contact tracing. We define and calculate basic and effective reproduction numbers in terms of pathogen characteristics and contact tracing implementation constraints. When applied to the case of SARS-CoV-2, our results show that only combinations of diagnosis of symptomatic infections and contact tracing that are almost perfect in terms of speed and coverage can attain control, unless additional measures to reduce overall community transmission are in place. Under constraints on the testing or tracing capacity, a temporary interruption of contact tracing may, depending on the overall growth rate and prevalence of the infection, lead to an irreversible loss of control even when the epidemic was previously contained.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.