A mathematical assessment of the efficiency of quarantining and contact tracing in curbing the COVID-19 epidemic

In our model of the COVID-19 epidemic, infected individuals can be of four types, according whether they are asymptomatic (A) or symptomatic (I), and use a contact tracing mobile phone application (Y ) or not (N). We denote by R0 the average number of secondary infections from a random infected individual. We investigate the effect of non-digital interventions (voluntary isolation upon symptom onset, quarantining private contacts) and of digital interventions (contact tracing thanks to the app), depending on the willingness to quarantine, parameterized by four cooperating probabilities. For a given ‘effective’ R0 obtained with non-digital interventions, we use non-negative matrix theory and stopping line techniques to characterize mathematically the minimal fraction y0 of app users needed to curb the epidemic, i.e., for the epidemic to die out with probability 1. We show that under a wide range of scenarios, the threshold y0 as a function of R0 rises steeply from 0 at R0 = 1 to prohibitively large values (of the order of 60−70% up) whenever R0 is above 1.3. Our results show that moderate rates of adoption of a contact tracing app can reduce R0 but are by no means sufficient to reduce it below 1 unless it is already very close to 1 thanks to non-digital interventions