Published Online : 2024-12-30
As COVID-19 spreads around the globe, the
governments have imposed quarantines and travel
bans on an unprecedented scale. They are often
the first response against new infectious diseases.
However, these old tools are usually of limited
utility for highly transmissible diseases, and if
imposed with too heavy a hand, or in too haphazard
a manner, they can be counterproductive. In public
health practice, “quarantine” refers to the separation
of persons who have been exposed to an infectious
disease. In order to clarify the extent to which an
ideal quarantine measure suppresses epidemics, a
review on several studies, considers a simple case
in which an individual is detected and its neighbors
are promptly quarantined. A well mixed “susceptible
exposed infectious recovered” (SEIR) compartmental
model was employed to described the dynamics of
the COVID-19, and quarantine intervention measures
of the authority. Considering infected individuals as
contagious during the latency period, the well-mixed
SEIR model fitting results based on the assumed
contact rates of latent individuals are within 6-18,
which represented the possible impact of quarantine
and isolation interventions on disease infections. The
reviews revealed that by reducing the contact rate of
latent individuals, interventions such as quarantine
and isolation can effectively reduce the potential peak
number of COVID-19 infections and delay the time of
peak infection.
Review Article
English
P. 111-115