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High infectiousness immediately before COVID-19 symptom onset highlights the importance of continued contact tracing

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Hart, William Stephen, Maini, Philip K. and Thompson, Robin N. (2021) High infectiousness immediately before COVID-19 symptom onset highlights the importance of continued contact tracing. eLife, 10 . e65534. doi:10.7554/eLife.65534

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Official URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.7554/eLife.65534

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Abstract

Background: Understanding changes in infectiousness during SARS-COV-2 infections is critical to assess the effectiveness of public health measures such as contact tracing.

Methods: Here, we develop a novel mechanistic approach to infer the infectiousness profile of SARS-COV-2 infected individuals using data from known infector-infectee pairs. We compare estimates of key epidemiological quantities generated using our mechanistic method with analogous estimates generated using previous approaches.

Results: The mechanistic method provides an improved fit to data from SARS-CoV-2 infector-infectee pairs compared to commonly used approaches. Our best-fitting model indicates a high proportion of presymptomatic transmissions, with many transmissions occurring shortly before the infector develops symptoms.

Conclusions: High infectiousness immediately prior to symptom onset highlights the importance of continued contact tracing until effective vaccines have been distributed widely, even if contacts from a short time window before symptom onset alone are traced.

Funding: Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC).

Item Type: Journal Article
Subjects: Q Science > QA Mathematics
R Medicine > RA Public aspects of medicine
Divisions: Faculty of Science > Mathematics
Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH): COVID-19 (Disease), COVID-19 (Disease) -- Epidemiology -- Statistical methods , COVID-19 (Disease) -- Forecasting -- Statistical methods , Contact tracing (Epidemiology) -- Statistical methods
Journal or Publication Title: eLife
Publisher: eLife Sciences Publications Ltd.
ISSN: 2050-084X
Official Date: 26 April 2021
Dates:
DateEvent
26 April 2021Published
25 April 2021Accepted
Volume: 10
Article Number: e65534
DOI: 10.7554/eLife.65534
Status: Peer Reviewed
Publication Status: Published
Access rights to Published version: Open Access
RIOXX Funder/Project Grant:
Project/Grant IDRIOXX Funder NameFunder ID
UNSPECIFIED[EPSRC] Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Councilhttp://dx.doi.org/10.13039/501100000266

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