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)
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 of a digital contact tracing system that LTC facilities can use to rapidly identify and contain asymptomatic and symptomatic SARS-CoV-2 infected contacts. A compartmental model was also developed to simulate disease transmission dynamics and to assess system performance versus conventional methods.
Methods:
We developed a compartmental model parameterized specifically to assess COVID-19 transmission in LTC facilities. The model was used to quantify the impact of asymptomatic transmission and to assess the performance of several intervention groups to control outbreaks: no intervention, symptom mapping, PCR testing, manual and digital contact tracing.
Results:
Our digital contact tracing system allows users to rapidly identify and then isolate close contacts, store and track infection data in a respiratory line listing tool, and identify contaminated rooms. Our simulation results indicate that the speed and efficiency of digital contact tracing contributed to superior control performance yielding up to 52% fewer cases than conventional methods.
Conclusions:
Digital contact tracing systems show promise as effective tool to control COVID-19 outbreaks in LTC facilities. 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
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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.