Simulating the effect of bidirectional contact tracing on the spread of infectious diseases

Abstract

The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic can hardly be overstated. In February 2020, the World Health Organisation recommended to prioritize extensive testing and contact tracing to contain the virus. Through bidirectional contact tracing, we can not only find the people infected by an infectious individual, but the infector of the individual as well. Theoretically, this makes bidirectional contact tracing an effective countermeasure for diseases where a proportion of the population is asymptomatic or a super spreader. Due to its recursive nature, it is hard to incorporate the effects of bidirectional contact tracing into existing analytical models for infectious diseases. Instead, we built an event-by-event simulation model. Using this simulation model, we obtain results regarding the effectiveness of bidirectional contact tracing in various scenarios.