University of Massachusetts Medical School Faculty Publications
UMMS Affiliation
Program in Bioinformatics and Integrative Biology; Department of Microbiology and Physiological Systems
Publication Date
2021-03-25
Document Type
Article Preprint
Disciplines
Community Health and Preventive Medicine | Diagnosis | Epidemiology | Infectious Disease | Microbiology | Virus Diseases
Abstract
Amid COVID-19, many institutions deployed vast resources to test their members regularly for safe reopening. This self-focused approach, however, not only overlooks surrounding communities but also remains blind to community transmission that could breach the institution. To test the relative merits of a more altruistic strategy, we built an epidemiological model that assesses the differential impact on case counts when institutions instead allocate a proportion of their tests to members’ close contacts in the larger community. We found that testing outside the institution benefits the institution in all plausible circumstances, with the optimal proportion of tests to use externally landing at 45% under baseline model parameters. Our results were robust to local prevalence, secondary attack rate, testing capacity, and contact reporting level, yielding a range of optimal community testing proportions from 18% to 58%. The model performed best under the assumption that community contacts are known to the institution; however, it still demonstrated a significant benefit even without complete knowledge of the contact network.
Keywords
Epidemiology, community transmission, COVID-19, testing
Rights and Permissions
The copyright holder for this preprint is the author/funder, who has granted medRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under a CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license.
DOI of Published Version
10.1101/2021.03.16.21253669
Source
medRxiv 2021.03.16.21253669; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.03.16.21253669. Link to preprint on medRxiv
Journal/Book/Conference Title
medRxiv
Repository Citation
Specht I, Sani K, Botti-Lodovico Y, Hughes M, Heumann K, Bronson A, Marshall J, Baron E, Parrie E, Glennon O, Fry B, Colubri A, Sabeti PC. (2021). The Case for Altruism in Institutional Diagnostic Testing [preprint]. University of Massachusetts Medical School Faculty Publications. https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.03.16.21253669. Retrieved from https://escholarship.umassmed.edu/faculty_pubs/2015
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
Included in
Community Health and Preventive Medicine Commons, Diagnosis Commons, Epidemiology Commons, Infectious Disease Commons, Microbiology Commons, Virus Diseases Commons
Comments
This article is a preprint. Preprints are preliminary reports of work that have not been certified by peer review.
The PDF available for download is Version 2 of this preprint. The complete version history of this preprint is available at https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.03.16.21253669.