Vaccines alone are no silver bullets: a modeling study on the impact of efficient contact tracing on COVID-19 infection and transmission in Malaysia

BACKGROUND: The computer simulation presented in this study aimed to investigate the effect of contact tracing on coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) transmission and infection in the context of rising vaccination rates.

METHODS: This study proposed a deterministic, compartmental model with contact tracing and vaccination components. We defined contact tracing effectiveness as the proportion of contacts of a positive case that was successfully traced and the vaccination rate as the proportion of daily doses administered per population in Malaysia. Sensitivity analyses on the untraced and infectious populations were conducted.

RESULTS: At a vaccination rate of 1.4%, contact tracing with an effectiveness of 70% could delay the peak of untraced asymptomatic cases by 17 d and reduce it by 70% compared with 30% contact tracing effectiveness. A similar trend was observed for symptomatic cases when a similar experiment setting was used. We also performed sensitivity analyses by using different combinations of contact tracing effectiveness and vaccination rates. In all scenarios, the effect of contact tracing on COVID-19 incidence persisted for both asymptomatic and symptomatic cases.

CONCLUSIONS: While vaccines are progressively rolled out, efficient contact tracing must be rapidly implemented concurrently to reach, find, test, isolate and support the affected populations to bring COVID-19 under control.