Recursive contact tracing in Reed-Frost epidemic models

Abstract

We introduce a Reed-Frost epidemic model with recursive contact tracing and asymptomatic transmission. This generalizes the branching-process model introduced by the authors in a previous work [arxiv:2004.07237] to finite populations and general contact networks. We simulate the model numerically for two representative examples, the complete graph and the square lattice. On both networks, we observe clear signatures of a contact-tracing phase transition from an "epidemic phase" to an "immune phase" as contact-network coverage is increased. We verify that away from the singular line of perfect tracing, the finite-size scaling of the contact-tracing phase transition on each network lies in the corresponding percolation universality class. Finally, we use the model to quantify the efficacy of recursive contact-tracing in regimes where epidemic spread is not contained.