Our paper looking at different COVID-19 testing/quarantine strategies for air travel

Our new The Lancet Infectious Diseases paper is out. We used microsimulation to evaluate different testing and quarantine strategies for air travel. The simulation incorporates day-specific test sensitivity, asymptomatic infections, and differential levels of adherence to self-quarantine. Given all the travel for holidays and spring break, we’re hoping it provides some useful insight for airlines and public health departments.

A couple related items:

In addition to (hopefully) being useful, this project was a lot of fun — especially considering the urgency. A lot of time was saved because it was built on open-source code from another paper. Still, this one went from an idea Nathan and I chatted about to a pre-print in a little over a month, went through expedited review (fun fact: that’s what the little bird icon is on the top of some Lancet papers) in a month, then returned back to the journal with revisions and accepted in about another month, and finally went through a couple rounds of super helpful editorial revisions and proofing in a month.

When it was all said and done, we went from an idea to a published manuscript in just under 5 months. I’ve literally had other papers under review for that entire duration — The Lancet journals are not messing around when they call it expedited review. Special thanks to Elizabeth Chin for help with the coding infrastructure and Nathan Lo for supervising the whole thing.