Sensitivity of contact-tracing for COVID-19 in Thailand: a capture-recapture application

BACKGROUND: We investigate the completeness of contact tracing for COVID-19 during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in Thailand, from early January 2020 to 30 June 2020. METHODS: Uni-list capture-recapture models were applied to the frequency distributions of index cases to inform two questions: (1) the unobserved number of index cases with contacts, and (2) the unobserved number of index cases with secondary cases among their contacts. RESULTS: Generalized linear models (using Poisson and logistic families) did not return any significant predictor (age, sex, nationality, number of contacts per case) on the risk of transmission and hence capture-recapture models did not adjust for observed heterogeneity. Best fitting models, a zero truncated negative binomial for question 1 and zero-truncated Poisson for question 2, returned sensitivity estimates for contact tracing performance of 77.6% (95% CI = 73.75–81.54%) and 67.6% (95% CI = 53.84–81.38%), respectively. A zero-inflated negative binomial model on the distribution of index cases with secondary cases allowed the estimation of the effective reproduction number at 0.14 (95% CI = 0.09–0.22), and the overdispersion parameter at 0.1. CONCLUSION: Completeness of COVID-19 contact tracing in Thailand during the first wave appeared moderate, with around 67% of infectious transmission chains detected. Overdispersion was present suggesting that most of the index cases did not result in infectious transmission chains and the majority of transmission events stemmed from a small proportion of index cases.