Predicting Quarantine Failure Rates

Abstract

Preemptive quarantine through contact-tracing effectively controls emerging infectious diseases. Occasionally this quarantine fails, however, and infected persons are released. The probability of quarantine failure is typically estimated from disease-specific data. Here a simple, exact estimate of the failure rate is derived that does not depend on disease-specific parameters. This estimate is universally applicable to all infectious diseases.

Keywords

• emerging diseases
• parasite
• contact-tracing
• incubation time
• epidemiology