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Quantifying the impact of contact tracing interview prioritisation strategies on disease transmission

Wu, L. B.; Baker, C. B.; Tierney, N.; Carville, K.; McVernon, J.; McCaw, J.; Golding, N.; Shearer, F. M.

2024-05-03 public and global health
10.1101/2024.04.30.24306519 medRxiv
Show abstract

Contact tracing is an important public health measure used to reduce transmission of infectious diseases. Contact tracers typically conduct telephone interviews with cases to identify contacts and direct them to quarantine, with the aim of preventing onward transmission. However, in situations where caseloads exceed the capacity of the public health system, timely interviews may not be feasible for all cases. Here we present a modelling framework for assessing the impact of different case interview prioritisation strategies on disease transmission. Our model is based on Australian contact tracing procedures and informed by contact tracing data on COVID-19 cases notified in Australia from 2020-21. Our results demonstrate that last-in-first-out strategies are more effective at reducing transmission than first-in-first-out strategies or strategies with no explicit prioritisation. To maximise the public health benefit from a given case interview capacity, public health practitioners should consider our findings when designing case interview prioritisation protocols for outbreak response.

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"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.