Researcher, Bruce Lee and colleagues in the Public Health Informatics, Computational, and Operations Research (PHICOR) team and the Lundquist Research Institute at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center have developed a new computational analysis suggesting a COVID-10 vaccine or medication could shorten the infectious period of COVID-19 preventing millions of infections and save billions of dollars. Their study is published in the journal PLOS Computational Biology.
Their computation model simulates the spread of the virus and enables the researchers to investigate how a vaccine or medication could reduce the contagious period. Additionally, they can explore how this could help the economic and clinical impacts of SARS-CoV-2.
Their simulation demonstrated that reducing the contagious period by half a day could prevent up to 1.4 million cases, over 99,000 hospitalizations, and savings of nearly $209.5 billion in direct medical and indirect costs. Using the same parameters, cutting the contagious period by 3.5 days could avert up to 7.4 million cases. Increasing such treatment to 75 percent of everyone infected could avert 29.7 million cases and save $856 billion.
"There may be a tendency to overlook vaccines and other treatments that don't prevent a COVID-19 infection or cure disease," says Lee. "But this study showed that even relatively small changes in how long people are contagious can significantly affect the transmission and spread of the virus and thus save billions of dollars and avert millions of new cases."