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Alternating quarantine for sustainable epidemic mitigation

Absent pharmaceutical interventions, social distancing, lock-downs and mobility restrictions remain our prime response in the face of epidemic outbreaks. To ease their potentially devastating socioeconomic consequences, we propose here an alternating quarantine strategy: at every instance, half of t...

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Autores principales: Meidan, Dror, Schulmann, Nava, Cohen, Reuven, Haber, Simcha, Yaniv, Eyal, Sarid, Ronit, Barzel, Baruch
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Nature Publishing Group UK 2021
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7801583/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33431866
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-20324-8
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author Meidan, Dror
Schulmann, Nava
Cohen, Reuven
Haber, Simcha
Yaniv, Eyal
Sarid, Ronit
Barzel, Baruch
author_facet Meidan, Dror
Schulmann, Nava
Cohen, Reuven
Haber, Simcha
Yaniv, Eyal
Sarid, Ronit
Barzel, Baruch
author_sort Meidan, Dror
collection PubMed
description Absent pharmaceutical interventions, social distancing, lock-downs and mobility restrictions remain our prime response in the face of epidemic outbreaks. To ease their potentially devastating socioeconomic consequences, we propose here an alternating quarantine strategy: at every instance, half of the population remains under lockdown while the other half continues to be active - maintaining a routine of weekly succession between activity and quarantine. This regime minimizes infectious interactions, as it allows only half of the population to interact for just half of the time. As a result it provides a dramatic reduction in transmission, comparable to that achieved by a population-wide lockdown, despite sustaining socioeconomic continuity at  ~50% capacity. The weekly alternations also help address the specific challenge of COVID-19, as their periodicity synchronizes with the natural SARS-CoV-2 disease time-scales, allowing to effectively isolate the majority of infected individuals precisely at the time of their peak infection.
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spelling pubmed-78015832021-01-21 Alternating quarantine for sustainable epidemic mitigation Meidan, Dror Schulmann, Nava Cohen, Reuven Haber, Simcha Yaniv, Eyal Sarid, Ronit Barzel, Baruch Nat Commun Article Absent pharmaceutical interventions, social distancing, lock-downs and mobility restrictions remain our prime response in the face of epidemic outbreaks. To ease their potentially devastating socioeconomic consequences, we propose here an alternating quarantine strategy: at every instance, half of the population remains under lockdown while the other half continues to be active - maintaining a routine of weekly succession between activity and quarantine. This regime minimizes infectious interactions, as it allows only half of the population to interact for just half of the time. As a result it provides a dramatic reduction in transmission, comparable to that achieved by a population-wide lockdown, despite sustaining socioeconomic continuity at  ~50% capacity. The weekly alternations also help address the specific challenge of COVID-19, as their periodicity synchronizes with the natural SARS-CoV-2 disease time-scales, allowing to effectively isolate the majority of infected individuals precisely at the time of their peak infection. Nature Publishing Group UK 2021-01-11 /pmc/articles/PMC7801583/ /pubmed/33431866 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-20324-8 Text en © The Author(s) 2021 Open Access This 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 license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license 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 license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
spellingShingle Article
Meidan, Dror
Schulmann, Nava
Cohen, Reuven
Haber, Simcha
Yaniv, Eyal
Sarid, Ronit
Barzel, Baruch
Alternating quarantine for sustainable epidemic mitigation
title Alternating quarantine for sustainable epidemic mitigation
title_full Alternating quarantine for sustainable epidemic mitigation
title_fullStr Alternating quarantine for sustainable epidemic mitigation
title_full_unstemmed Alternating quarantine for sustainable epidemic mitigation
title_short Alternating quarantine for sustainable epidemic mitigation
title_sort alternating quarantine for sustainable epidemic mitigation
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7801583/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33431866
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-20324-8
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