ArticleJournal of the Royal Society, Interface2021
Effect of manual and digital contact tracing on COVID-19 outbreaks: a study on empirical contact data.
Article in Journal of the Royal Society, Interface, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 39 papers, 2 of them syntheses that pooled it.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
39 citing papers in PubMed, 2 syntheses or guidelines pooled it.
- The role of digital tools and emerging devices in COVID-19 contact tracing during the first 18 months of the pandemic: a systematic review.European journal of public health · 2024Pooled it
- Comparative effectiveness of contact tracing interventions in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic: a systematic review.European journal of epidemiology · 2023Pooled it
- Impact of Digital Contact Tracing and Other Nonpharmaceutical Interventions on Pandemic Control: Microlevel, Behavior-Driven Agent-Based Model Analysis.Journal of medical Internet research · 2026Article
- Transforming a Pandemic Tool Into a Public Health Asset: Modified Delphi Study.JMIR public health and surveillance · 2026Article
- To trace or not to trace: analytical insights from network-based contact-tracing models.Journal of mathematical biology · 2026Article
- Multilayer networks describing urban interactions for building the digital twins of five cities in Spain.Scientific data · 2025Article
- Integrating Human Mobility Models with Epidemic Modeling: A Framework for Generating Synthetic Temporal Contact Networks.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Preserving friendships in school contacts: An algorithm to construct synthetic temporal networks for epidemic modelling.PLoS computational biology · 2024Article
- Effectiveness of probabilistic contact tracing in epidemic containment: The role of superspreaders and transmission path reconstruction.PNAS nexus · 2024Article
- Effects of User Experience in Automated Information Processing on Perceived Usefulness of Digital Contact-Tracing Apps: Cross-Sectional Survey Study.JMIR human factors · 2024Article
- Mobility census for monitoring rapid urban development.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2024Article
- Evaluating completion rates of COVID-19 contact tracing surveys in New York City.BMC public health · 2024Article
- Community-Based Digital Contact Tracing of Emerging Infectious Diseases: Design and Implementation Study With Empirical COVID-19 Cases.Journal of medical Internet research · 2023Article
- Assessing individual risk and the latent transmission of COVID-19 in a population with an interaction-driven temporal model.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- A Survey on harnessing the Applications of Mobile Computing in Healthcare during the COVID-19 Pandemic: Challenges and Solutions.Computer networks · 2023Review
- Feasibility of digital contact tracing in low-income settings - pilot trial for a location-based DCT app.BMC public health · 2023Article
- Transformative practice and its interactional challenges in COVID-19 telephone contact tracing in Flanders.Frontiers in psychology · 2023Article
- Characterizing the role of human behavior in the effectiveness of contact-tracing applications.Frontiers in public health · 2023Article
- Privacy and security concerns with passively collected location data for digital contact tracing among U.S. college students.PloS one · 2023Article
- Population-wide measures due to the COVID-19 pandemic and exposome changes in the general population of Cyprus in March-May 2020.BMC public health · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Non-pharmaceutical interventions are crucial to mitigate the COVID-19 pandemic and contain re-emergence phenomena. Targeted measures such as case isolation and contact tracing can alleviate the societal cost of lock-downs by containing the spread where and when it occurs. To assess the relative and combined impact of manual contact tracing (MCT) and digital (app-based) contact tracing, we feed a compartmental model for COVID-19 with high-resolution datasets describing contacts between individuals in several contexts. We show that the benefit (epidemic size reduction) is generically linear in the fraction of contacts recalled during MCT and quadratic in the app adoption, with no threshold effect. The cost (number of quarantines) versus benefit curve has a characteristic parabolic shape, independent of the type of tracing, with a potentially high benefit and low cost if app adoption and MCT efficiency are high enough. Benefits are higher and the cost lower if the epidemic reproductive number is lower, showing the importance of combining tracing with additional mitigation measures. The observed phenomenology is qualitatively robust across datasets and parameters. We moreover obtain analytically similar results on simplified models.
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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.