The World Health Organisation (WHO) has very strongly recommended testing and isolation as a strategy for controlling the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. The goal of this paper is to quantify the effects of detection and isolation in formal models of epidemics of varying complexity. A key parameter of such models is the basic reproduction ratio. We show that an effective detection and isolation strategy leads to a reduction of the basic reproduction ratio and can even lead to this ratio becoming lower than one.
@article{arxiv.2006.00482,
title = {Can Efficient Detection and Isolation Control an Epidemic?},
author = {Palash Sarkar},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2006.00482},
year = {2020}
}