A recent publication
Quantifying transmissibility of SARS-CoV-2 and impact of intervention within long-term healthcare facilities
Long-term healthcare (LTHC) facilities have been disproportionality affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, with high morbidity and mortality. In this work we estimated the basic reproduction number (R0) and the impact of outbreak interventions in 18 British Columbia LTHC facilties who saw SARS-CoV-2 outbreaks during 2020. We used a Bayesian hierarchical dynamical model, fit in RStan, to incorporate heterogeneity between facilities whilst recognising that all facilities were located in the same population and operated under the same recommended intervention procedures. This allowed us to fit relatively small outbreaks within the hierarchical structure, and provided more constrained estimates than standard non-hierarchical approaches.
We found that, despite there being uniform operating measures across all locations, final outbreak size and R0 varied drastically across the facilities. This was not explainable by any of the available facility statistics (including facility capacity and average resident age), and we proposed that this may be indicative of pronounced natural outbreak heterogeneity and large impact of early events (e.g. superspreaders), and suggested elsewhere for SARS-CoV-2. We also estimated that outbreak interventions averted approximately 60% of potential cases in these facilities.
Now published in Royal Society Open Science. Stockdale JE, Anderson SC, Edwards AM, Iyaniwura SA, Mulberry N, Otterstatter MC, Janjua NZ, Coombs D, Colijn C and Irvine MA, 2022.