An Epidemiological Model for contact tracing with the Dutch CoronaMelder App

TL;DR

This paper develops an epidemiological model to evaluate the effectiveness of the Dutch CoronaMelder contact tracing app, showing it modestly slows COVID-19 spread, especially with higher adoption in open societies.

Contribution

It introduces a specific epidemiological model for CoronaMelder and compares its effectiveness to manual contact tracing, highlighting its positive impact.

Findings

CoronaMelder has a small but positive effect on slowing COVID-19.

Effectiveness increases with higher adoption rates.

The app's impact is more significant in open society scenarios.

Abstract

We present an epidemiological model for the effectiveness of CoronaMelder, the Dutch digital contact tracing app developed on top of the Google/Apple Exposure Notification framework. We compare the effectiveness of CoronaMelder with manual contract tracing on a number of metrics. CoronaMelder turns out to have a small but noticeable positive influence in slowing down the COVID-19 pandemic, an effect that will become more pronounced in an opened-up society where adoption of CoronaMelder is increased.