Controlling emerging infectious diseases like SARS
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Updated: Aug 19, 2026

Swabbing the Urban Environment - A Pipeline for Sampling and Detection of SARS-CoV-2 From Environmental Reservoirs
Published on: April 9, 2021
Niels G Becker1, Kathryn Glass, Zhengfeng Li
1National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health, Australian National University, Canberra, ACT 0200, Australia. niels.becker@anu.edu.au
Abstract:
To control emerging infectious diseases like SARS, it is necessary to resort to basic control measures that limit exposures to infectious individuals. These measures include isolating cases at diagnosis, quarantining household members and tracing contacts of diagnosed cases, providing the community with advice on how to reduce exposures, and closing schools. To justify such intervention it is important to understand how well each of these measures helps to limit transmission. In this paper, we determine the effect of a number of different interventions on the effective reproduction number and estimate requirements to achieve elimination of the infectious disease. We find that the strategy of tracing and quarantining contacts of diagnosed cases can be very successful in reducing transmission.
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