Determination and estimation of optimal quarantine duration for infectious diseases with application to data analysis of COVID-19

TL;DR

This paper develops an optimal quarantine duration policy tailored to individual characteristics, minimizing unnecessary quarantine while ensuring high detection probability, with application to COVID-19 data analysis.

Contribution

It introduces a novel method for determining personalized quarantine durations that balance efficiency and detection accuracy, based on statistical estimation.

Findings

Optimal quarantine durations vary by individual characteristics.

The proposed policy effectively reduces quarantine time for uninfected individuals.

Application to COVID-19 data demonstrates practical utility.

Abstract

Quarantine measure is a commonly used non-pharmaceutical intervention during the outbreak of infectious diseases. A key problem for implementing quarantine measure is to determine the duration of quarantine. In this paper, a policy with optimal quarantine duration is developed. The policy suggests different quarantine durations for every individual with different characteristic. The policy is optimal in the sense that it minimizes the average quarantine duration of uninfected people with the constraint that the probability of symptom presentation for infected people attains the given value closing to 1. The optimal solution for the quarantine duration is obtained and estimated by some statistic methods with application to analyzing COVID-19 data.