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Trading contact tracing efficiency for finding patient zero
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A1 Alkuperäisartikkeli tieteellisessä aikakauslehdessä
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en
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10
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Scientific Reports, Volume 12, issue 1, pp. 1-10
Abstract
As the COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated, identifying the origin of a pandemic remains a challenging task. The search for patient zero may benefit from the widely-used and well-established toolkit of contact tracing methods, although this possibility has not been explored to date. We fill this gap by investigating the prospect of performing the source detection task as part of the contact tracing process, i.e., the possibility of tuning the parameters of the process in order to pinpoint the origin of the infection. To this end, we perform simulations on temporal networks using a recent diffusion model that recreates the dynamics of the COVID-19 pandemic. We find that increasing the budget for contact tracing beyond a certain threshold can significantly improve the identification of infected individuals but has diminishing returns in terms of source detection. Moreover, disease variants of higher infectivity make it easier to find the source but harder to identify infected individuals. Finally, we unravel a seemingly-intrinsic trade-off between the use of contact tracing to either identify infected nodes or detect the source of infection. This trade-off suggests that focusing on the identification of patient zero may come at the expense of identifying infected individuals.
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Funding Information: M.C. was supported by the Ministry of Universities of the Government of Spain, under the program “Convocatoria de Ayudas para la recualificación del sistema universitario español para 2021-2023, de la Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, de 1 de Julio de 2021”. P.H. was supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant Number JP 21H04595. Publisher Copyright: © 2022, The Author(s).
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Waniek, M, Holme, P, Farrahi, K, Emonet, R, Cebrian, M & Rahwan, T 2022, 'Trading contact tracing efficiency for finding patient zero', Scientific Reports, vol. 12, no. 1, 22582, pp. 1-10. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-26892-7