Social distancing versus early detection and contacts tracing in epidemic management

Abstract

Different countries – and sometimes different regions within the same countries – have adopted different strategies in trying to contain the ongoing COVID-19 epidemic; these mix in variable parts social confinement, early detection and contact tracing. In this paper we discuss the different effects of these ingredients on the epidemic dynamics; the discussion is conducted with the help of two simple models, i.e. the classical SIR model and the recently introduced variant A-SIR (arXiv:2003.08720) which takes into account the presence of a large set of asymptomatic infectives.