期刊名称：Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
印刷版ISSN：0027-8424
电子版ISSN：1091-6490
出版年度：2021
卷号：118
期号：32
DOI：10.1073/pnas.2106548118
语种：English
出版社：The National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
摘要：Significance
Contact tracing mobile applications are clear candidates for enabling us to slow down an epidemic and keep society running while holding the health risks down. Currently used mobile applications aim to notify individuals who were recently in significant contact with an individual who tested COVID-19 positive. In our work, we aim to quantify the epidemiological gain one would obtain if, additionally, individuals who were recently in contact could exchange messages of information. With such a message-passing addition, the risk of contracting COVID-19 could be estimated with much better accuracy than simple contact tracing. We conclude that probabilistic risk estimation is capable of enhancing performance of digital contact tracing and should be considered in the mobile tracing applications.
Contact tracing is an essential tool to mitigate the impact of a pandemic, such as the COVID-19 pandemic. In order to achieve efficient and scalable contact tracing in real time, digital devices can play an important role. While a lot of attention has been paid to analyzing the privacy and ethical risks of the associated mobile applications, so far much less research has been devoted to optimizing their performance and assessing their impact on the mitigation of the epidemic. We develop Bayesian inference methods to estimate the risk that an individual is infected. This inference is based on the list of his recent contacts and their own risk levels, as well as personal information such as results of tests or presence of syndromes. We propose to use probabilistic risk estimation to optimize testing and quarantining strategies for the control of an epidemic. Our results show that in some range of epidemic spreading (typically when the manual tracing of all contacts of infected people becomes practically impossible but before the fraction of infected people reaches the scale where a lockdown becomes unavoidable), this inference of individuals at risk could be an efficient way to mitigate the epidemic. Our approaches translate into fully distributed algorithms that only require communication between individuals who have recently been in contact. Such communication may be encrypted and anonymized, and thus, it is compatible with privacy-preserving standards. We conclude that probabilistic risk estimation is capable of enhancing the performance of digital contact tracing and should be considered in the mobile applications.
