Importance of untested infectious individuals for interventions to suppress COVID-19

Abstract

The impact of the extent of testing infectious individuals on suppression of COVID-19 is illustrated from the early stages of outbreaks in Germany, the Hubei province of China, Italy, Spain and the UK. The predicted percentage of untested infected individuals depends on the specific outbreak but we found that they typically represent 60–80% of all infected individuals during the early stages of the outbreaks. We propose that reducing the underlying transmission from untested cases is crucial to suppress the virus. This can be achieved through enhanced testing in combination with social distancing and other interventions that reduce transmission such as wearing face masks. Once transmission from silent carriers is kept under control by these means, the virus could have been fully suppressed through fast isolation and contact tracing of tested cases.

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Open Access Tis article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

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Identifiers

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-00056-5

Repository URI

https://hdl.handle.net/2164/17371