Transmission-guided resource allocation

To optimally direct resources to the communities with the greatest needs, we develop a transmission-guided strategy, which prioritizes different districts for testing resource allocation according to their population size, number of infections, and more importantly, the transmission risk. Note that the testing discussed in this study is not an isolated action but an integrative case management process, including testing for detection, quarantine, and further treatment. Therefore, in our study, we consider that the infected individuals detected by the testing will be immediately quarantined and thus cannot further infect other susceptible individuals. To validate the effectiveness of our strategy, we further develop a compartmental model at the meta-population level called Susceptible-Detected-Nondetected-Recovered (SDNR) model to simulate the future trend of the disease transmission. The structure of proposed SDNR model is shown in Fig. 1. In each district, the proposed SDNR model divides the compartment of infectious population into two sub-groups: detected infections and non-detected infections, which are decided by the allocation rate of resources and the infection rate. The 18 individual compartmental models (one for each district) are integrated in our SDNR model using the constructed transmission matrices across 18 districts. Please refer to the Additional file 1 for more details of the transmission-guided resource allocation.

The structure of the proposed SDNR compartmental model