National Laboratory
for Health Security
HUNGARY

Epidemic model for risk-based testing and quarantine

Abstract: We construct and analyse a compartmental model for the spread of COVID-19 considering testing and quarantine with a risk-based evaluation of individuals to be tested, meaning that symptomatic individuals as well as contacts of confirmed cases are tested with higher probability. The model includes the isolation of the positively tested, for a fixed period of time, represented by a time delay in the differential equations. For a simplified version of the model we derive a final size relation, and we show that it approximates well the final epidemic size of the original model. Numerical simulations suggest that even a small improvement in identifying individuals with higher risk of being infected makes a testing program more efficient, having a significant impact on the mitigation of the epidemic.