@article{53bb0475c6374954bf65e7908bf6a4d4,
title = "Outbreaks in care homes may lead to substantial disease burden if not mitigated",
abstract = "The number of COVID-19 outbreaks reported in UK care homes rose rapidly in early March of 2020. Owing to the increased co-morbidities and therefore worse COVID-19 outcomes for care home residents, it is important that we understand this increase and its future implications. We demonstrate the use of an SIS model where each nursing home is an infective unit capable of either being susceptible to an outbreak (S) or in an active outbreak (I). We use a generalized additive model to approximate the trend in growth rate of outbreaks in care homes and find the fit to be improved in a model where the growth rate is proportional to the number of current care home outbreaks compared with a model with a constant growth rate. Using parameters found from the outbreak-dependent growth rate, we predict a 73% prevalence of outbreaks in UK care homes without intervention as a reasonable worst-case planning assumption. This article is part of the theme issue 'Modelling that shaped the early COVID-19 pandemic response in the UK'.",
keywords = "care home, institutional outbreaks, mathematical modelling",
author = "Ian Hall and Hugo Lewkowicz and Luke Webb and Thomas House and Lorenzo Pellis and James Sedgwick and Nick Gent",
note = "Funding Information: release of data is not possible owing to the the disclosure status of data. Authors{\textquoteright} contributions. I.H., N.G., T.H. and L.P. conceived the study. J.S. and N.G. cleaned the data and advised on interpretations. I.H., H.L. and L.W. performed the analysis. All authors contributed to writing the paper. Competing interests. We declare we have no competing interests. Funding. L.P. is supported by the Wellcome Trust and the Royal Society (grant no. 202562/Z/16/Z). T.H. is supported by the Royal Society (grant no. INF/R2/180067). I.H. is supported by the National Institute for Health Research Policy Research Programme in Operational Research (OPERA, PR-R17-0916-21001). L.W. and H.L. are on studentships supported by the Medical Research Council. I.H., L.P. and T.H. are supported by The Alan Turing Institute for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence, EPSRC (EP/V027468/1) and by UKRI through the JUNIPER modelling consortium (grant no. MR/ V038613/1). Publisher Copyright: {\textcopyright} 2021 The Authors.",
year = "2021",
month = jul,
day = "19",
doi = "10.1098/rstb.2020.0269",
language = "English",
volume = "376",
journal = "Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences",
issn = "0962-8436",
publisher = "The Royal Society Publishing",
number = "1829",
}
