Mass Testing With Contact Tracing Compared to Test and Trace for the Effective Suppression of COVID-19 in the United Kingdom: Systematic Review
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Making testing available to everyone and tracing contacts might be the gold standard to control COVID-19. Many countries including the United Kingdom have relied on the symptom-based test and trace strategy in bringing the COVID-19 pandemic under control. The effectiveness of a test and trace strategy based on symptoms has been questionable and has failed to meet testing and tracing needs. This is further exacerbated by it not being delivered at the point of care, leading to rising cases and deaths. Increases in COVID-19 cases and deaths in the United Kingdom despite performing the highest number of tests in Europe suggest that symptom-based testing and contact tracing might not be effective as a control strategy. An alternative strategy is making testing available to all. OBJECTIVE: The primary objective of this review was to compare mass testing and contact tracing with the conventional test and trace method in the suppression of SARS-CoV-2 infections. The secondary objective was to determine the proportion of asymptomatic COVID-19 cases reported during mass testing interventions. METHODS: Literature in English was searched from September through December 2020 in Google Scholar, ScienceDirect, Mendeley, and PubMed. Search terms included "mass testing," "test and trace," "contact tracing," "COVID-19," "SARS-CoV-2," "effectiveness," "asymptomatic," "symptomatic," "community screening," "UK," and "2020." Search results were synthesized without meta-analysis using the direction of effect as the standardized metric and vote counting as the synthesis metric. A statistical synthesis was performed using Stata 14.2. Tabular and graphical methods were used to present findings. RESULTS: =.09) majority vote in favor of the intervention under the primary objective. The overall proportion of asymptomatic cases among those who tested positive and in the tested sample populations under the secondary objective was 40.7% (1084/2661, 95% CI 38.9%-42.6%) and 0.0% (1084/9,942,878, 95% CI 0.0%-0.0%), respectively. CONCLUSIONS: There was low-level but promising evidence that mass testing and contact tracing could be more effective in bringing the virus under control and even more effective if combined with social distancing and face coverings. The conventional test and trace method should be superseded by decentralized and regular mass rapid testing and contact tracing, championed by general practitioner surgeries and low-cost community services.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.025 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it