Volta
What effect might border screening have on preventing importation of COVID-19 compared with other infections? A modelling study
Unknown authors
· 2020
hash_id: 879b2fdb6768e90b1b05552b3960528fbe147117b1535b23b6ca68ad1d0373fe
· DOI: 10.1101/2020.07.10.20150664
Abstract The effectiveness of screening travellers during times of international disease outbreak is contentious, especially as the reduction in the risk of disease importation can be very small. Border screening typically consists of travellers being thermally scanned for signs of fever and/or completing a survey declaring any possible symptoms prior to admission to their destination country; while more thorough testing typically exists, these would generally prove more disruptive to deploy. In this paper, we describe a simple Monte Carlo based model that incorporates the epidemiology of COVID-19 to investigate the potential benefit of requiring all travellers to undergo thorough screening upon arrival. This is a purely theoretical study to investigate whether a single test at point of entry might ever …