Novel Use of Capture-Recapture Methods to Estimate Completeness of Contact Tracing during an Ebola Outbreak, Democratic Republic of the Congo, 2018–2020

Polonsky, Jonathan A.; Böhning, Dankmar; Keita, Mory; Ahuka-Mundeke, Steve; Nsio-Mbeta, Justus; Abedi, Aaron Aruna; Mossoko, Mathias; Estill, Janne; Keiser, Olivia; Kaiser, Laurent; Yoti, Zabulon; Sangnawakij, Patarawan; Lerdsuwansri, Rattana; Vilas, Victor J. Del Rio

doi:10.3201/eid2712.204958

i

Novel Use of Capture-Recapture Methods to Estimate Completeness of Contact Tracing during an Ebola Outbreak, Democratic Republic of the Congo, 2018–2020

Supporting Files Public Domain

12 2021
By Polonsky, Jonathan A. ; Böhning, Dankmar ; Keita, Mory
http://dx.doi.org/10.3201/eid2712.204958

File Language:

English

Details

Alternative Title:

Emerg Infect Dis
Personal Author:

Polonsky, Jonathan A. ; Böhning, Dankmar ; Keita, Mory ; Ahuka-Mundeke, Steve ; Nsio-Mbeta, Justus ; Abedi, Aaron Aruna ; Mossoko, Mathias ; Estill, Janne ; Keiser, Olivia ; Kaiser, Laurent ; Yoti, Zabulon ; Sangnawakij, Patarawan ; Lerdsuwansri, Rattana ; Vilas, Victor J. Del Rio
Description:

Despite its critical role in containing outbreaks, the efficacy of contact tracing, measured as the sensitivity of case detection, remains an elusive metric. We estimated the sensitivity of contact tracing by applying unilist capture-recapture methods on data from the 2018-2020 outbreak of Ebola virus disease in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. To compute sensitivity, we applied different distributional assumptions to the zero-truncated count data to estimate the number of unobserved case-patients with any contacts and infected contacts. Geometric distributions were the best-fitting models. Our results indicate that contact tracing efforts identified almost all (n = 792, 99%) of case-patients with any contacts but only half (n = 207, 48%) of case-patients with infected contacts, suggesting that contact tracing efforts performed well at identifying contacts during the listing stage but performed poorly during the contact follow-up stage. We discuss extensions to our work and potential applications for the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.
Subjects:
Source:

Emerg Infect Dis. 2021; 27(12):3063-3072
Pubmed ID:

34808076
Pubmed Central ID:

PMC8632194
Document Type:

Journal Article
Place as Subject:

Democratic Republic of the Congo
Location:

Africa
Volume:

27
Issue:

12
Download URL:

https://stacks.cdc.gov/view/cdc/112600/cdc_112600_DS1.pdf
File Type:

[PDF - 2.09 MB]
Collection(s):

Emerging Infectious Diseases
Main Document Checksum:

urn:sha256:fa0ccb67c199a7f5801e3664ddd002e8d7b7546e2bd8150a89284ee5da8d5a1a

File Language:

English

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