A case for location based contact tracing

TL;DR

This paper compares manual and bulletin board location-based contact tracing methods, showing that the latter is less resource-intensive, easier to implement, and equally effective in controlling disease spread, based on a new SEIR model simulation.

Contribution

It introduces a novel location-based bulletin board contact tracing approach and evaluates its effectiveness against manual contact tracing using a calibrated SEIR model.

Findings

Bulletin board contact tracing is less resource intensive.

Both methods yield similar epidemiological outcomes.

Location-based tracing can enhance manual contact tracing efforts.

Abstract

We present an evaluation of the effectiveness of manual contact tracing compared to bulletin board contact tracing. We show that bulletin board contact tracing gives comparable results in terms of the reproductive number, duration, prevalence and incidence but is less resource intensive, easier to implement and offers a wider range of privacy options. Classical contact tracing focuses on contacting individuals whom an infectious person has been in proximity to. A bulletin board approach focuses on identifying locations visited by an infectious person, and then contacting those who were at those locations. We present results comparing their effects on the overall reproductive number as well as the incidence and prevalence of disease. We evaluate them by building a new discrete time stochastic model based on the Susceptible Exposed Infectious and Recovered (SEIR) framework for disease spread. We conduct simulation experiments to quantify the effectiveness of these two models of contact tracing by calibrating the model to be compatible with SARS-CoV-2. Our experiments show that location-based bulletin board contact tracing can improve manual contact tracing.