Test allocation based on risk of infection from first and second order contact tracing

Abstract

Under limited available resources, strategies for mitigating the propagation of an epidemic such as random testing and contact tracing become inefficient. Here, we propose to accurately allocate the resources by computing over time an individual risk of infection based on the partial observation of the epidemic spreading on a contact network; this risk is defined as the probability of getting infected from any possible transmission chain up to length two, originating from recently detected individuals. To evaluate the performance of our method and the effects of some key parameters, we perform comparative simulated experiments using data generated by an agent-based model.