Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Public Health and Surveillance
Date Submitted: Jun 1, 2020
Open Peer Review Period: Jun 1, 2020 - Jun 15, 2020
Date Accepted: Aug 3, 2020
Date Submitted to PubMed: Aug 3, 2020
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
“Real-time digital contact tracing: Development of a system to control COVID-19 outbreaks in nursing homes and long-term care facilities”
ABSTRACT
Background:
Severe acute respiratory syndrome-coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) can spread rapidly in nursing homes and long term care (LTC) facilities. Symptoms-based screening and manual contact tracing have limitations that render them ineffective for containing viral spread in LTC facilities: (i) symptoms-based screening alone cannot identify asymptomatic infected persons; (ii) viral spread is too fast in confined living quarters to be contained by slow manual contact tracing processes.
Objective:
We describe the development and implementation of a digital contact tracing system that LTC facilities can use to rapidly identify, isolate and then test asymptomatic and symptomatic infected contacts. Computer simulation models were also developed to assess the performance of the system versus conventional containment methods.
Methods:
We developed a stochastic transmission model parameterized specifically for COVID-19 in LTC facilities. Using various scenarios we used the model to quantify the effectiveness of several intervention groups to control outbreaks: no intervention, symptom mapping, PCR testing, manual contact tracing, and digital contact tracing.
Results:
Our digital contact tracing system allows users to rapidly identify and then isolate close contacts, to store and track infection data in a respiratory line listing tool, and identify contaminated rooms. Our simulation results suggest that digital contact tracing allow for rapid and effective identification and containment of potentially infected contacts.
Conclusions:
Digital contact tracing systems show promise as effective tool to control COVID-19 outbreaks. As facilities prepare to relax restrictions and re-open to outside visitors, such tools will allow them to do so in a surgical, cost-effective manner that both controls outbreaks while also safely giving residents back the life they once had before this pandemic hit. Clinical Trial: Not applicable
Citation
Request queued. Please wait while the file is being generated. It may take some time.
Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.