{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/alternating-quarantine-for-sustainable","title":"Alternating quarantine for sustainable epidemic mitigation","arxiv_id":"2004.01453","date":"2020-09-22","proceeding":null,"authors":[],"abstract":"Absent a drug or vaccine, containing epidemic outbreaks is achieved by means\nof social distancing, specifically mobility restrictions and lock-downs. Such\nmeasures impose a hurtful toll on the economy, and are difficult to sustain for\nextended periods. As an alternative, we propose here an alternating quarantine\nstrategy, in which at every instance, half of the population remains under\nlock-down while the other half continues to be active, maintaining a routine of\nweekly succession between activity and quarantine. This regime affords a dual\npartition:\\ half of the population interacts for only half of the time,\nresulting in a dramatic reduction in transmission, comparable to that achieved\nby a population-wide lock-down. All the while, it enables socioeconomic\ncontinuity at $50\\%$ capacity. The proposed weekly alternations also address an\nadditional challenge, with specific relevance to COVID-19. Indeed, SARS-CoV-2\nexhibits a relatively long incubation period, in which individuals experience\nno symptoms, but may already contribute to the spread. Unable to selectively\nisolate these invisible spreaders, we resort to population-wide restrictions.\nHowever, under the alternating quarantine routine, if an individual was exposed\nduring their active week, by the time they complete their quarantine they will,\nin most cases, begin to exhibit symptoms. Hence this strategy isolates the\nmajority of pre-symptomatic individuals during their infectious phase, leading\nto a rapid decline in the viral spread, thus addressing one of the main\nchallenges in COVID-19 mitigation.","url_abs":"http://arxiv.org/abs/2004.01453v3","url_pdf":"http://arxiv.org/pdf/2004.01453v3.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"alternating-quarantine-for-sustainable","repo_url":"https://github.com/drormeidan/ALDCOVID19","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}