The impact of contact tracing and testing on controlling COVID-19 outbreak without lockdown in Hong Kong: An observational study.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Maintaining effective contact tracing to control COVID-19 is challenging. Rapid growth in the number of infected cases can overload tracing and testing capacity, resulting in failure to trace contacts and delays in confirming an infection until after symptom onset (confirmation delay), hence increasing transmissibility. A substantial outbreak in Hong Kong, which was suppressed with non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs), provided an opportunity to assess the impact of overloading contact tracing and of efforts to improve its efficiency.

Methods

Using epidemiological-link (epi-link) data, we calculated the probability and duration of confirmation delay for cases with and without an epi-link, among all 3,148 confirmed cases between 5 July and 15 August 2020. Logist

SUBMITTER: Yuan HY 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8759949 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature