Quantifying the Effects of Contact Tracing, Testing, and Containment Measures in the Presence of Infection Hotspots

Understand

Multiple lines of evidence strongly suggest that infection hotspots, where a single individual infects many others, play a key role in the transmission dynamics of COVID-19.

• However, most of the existing epidemiological models fail to capture this aspect by neither representing the sites visited by individuals explicitly nor characterizing disease transmission as a function of individual mobility patterns.
• In this work, we introduce a temporal point process modeling framework that specifically represents visits to the sites where individuals get in contact and infect each other.
• Under our model, the number of infections caused by an infectious individual naturally emerges to be overdispersed.