Jana Lasser (MedUni Vienna, CSH) will present an online talk within the seminar “Analysis of Complex Systems” on Friday, November 20, 2020 via Zoom. If you would like to attend, please email office@csh.ac.at
Title: Efficient testing strategies to prevent the spread of SARS-CoV-2 in nursing homes
Abstract:
Due to its high lethality amongst the elderly, nursing homes are in the eye of the COVID-19 storm. Emerging test procedures, such as antigen or RT LAMP tests, might enable us to protect nursing home residents by means of preventive screening strategies. Here, we develop a novel agent-based epidemiological model for the spread of SARS-CoV-2 in nursing homes to identify optimal preventive testing strategies to curb this spread. The model is microscopically calibrated to data from actual nursing homes in Austria, including the networks of social contacts of their residents and information on past outbreaks. We find that the effectiveness of preventive screenings depends critically on the timespan between test and test result, the detection threshold of the viral load for the test to give a positive result, and the screening frequencies of residents and employees.