{"doi":"10.1093/jtm/taaa226","title":"Curbing the COVID-19 pandemic with facility-based isolation of mild cases: a mathematical modeling study","abstract":"BACKGROUND: In many countries, patients with mild coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) are told to self-isolate at home, but imperfect compliance and shared living space with uninfected people limit the effectiveness of home-based isolation. We examine the impact of facility-based isolation compared to self-isolation at home on the continuing epidemic in the USA. METHODS: We developed a compartment model to simulate the dynamic transmission of COVID-19 and calibrated it to key epidemic measures in the USA from March to September 2020. We simulated facility-based isolation strategies with various capacities and starting times under different diagnosis rates. Our primary model outcomes are new infections and deaths over 2 months from October 2020 onwards. In addition to national-level estimations, we explored the effects of facility-based isolation under different epidemic burdens in major US Census Regions. We performed sensitivity analyses by varying key model assumptions and parameters. RESULTS: We find that facility-based isolation with moderate capacity of 5 beds per 10 000 total population could avert 4.17 (95% credible interval 1.65-7.11) million new infections and 16 000 (8000-23 000) deaths in 2 months compared with home-based isolation. These results are equivalent to relative reductions of 57% (44-61%) in new infections and 37% (27-40%) in deaths. Facility-based isolation with high capacity of 10 beds per 10 000 population could achieve reductions of 76% (62-84%) in new infections and 52% (37-64%) in deaths when supported by expanded testing with an additional 20% daily diagnosis rate. Delays in implementation would substantially reduce the impact of facility-based isolation. The effective capacity and the impact of facility-based isolation varied by epidemic stage across regions. CONCLUSION: Timely facility-based isolation for mild COVID-19 cases could substantially reduce the number of new infections and effectively curb the continuing epidemic in the USA. Local epidemic burdens should determine the scale of facility-based isolation strategies.","journal":"Journal of Travel Medicine","year":2020,"id":97462,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":33,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9369,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2020-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":482323,"name":"Qiushi Chen","orcid":"0000-0003-4031-2669","position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":482324,"name":"Juntao Yang","orcid":"0000-0003-1180-391X","position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":482325,"name":"Lin Lin","orcid":"0000-0002-7464-1172","position":3,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":482326,"name":"Linye Li","orcid":"0000-0002-8158-1980","position":4,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":482327,"name":"Lirui Jiao","orcid":"0000-0002-2505-7447","position":5,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":226715,"name":"Pascal Geldsetzer","orcid":"0000-0002-8878-5505","position":6,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":103956,"name":"Chen Wang","orcid":"0000-0001-7857-5435","position":7,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":261695,"name":"Annelies Wilder‐Smith","orcid":"0000-0003-0362-5375","position":8,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":22379,"name":"Till Bärnighausen","orcid":"0000-0002-4182-4212","position":9,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":482322,"name":"Simiao Chen","orcid":"0000-0003-0555-2157","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":49,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-18T22:36:02.818637Z","pmid":"33274387","pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}