Contact Tracing Evaluation for COVID-19 Transmission during the Reopening Phase in a Rural College Town in the USA

Contact tracing can play a vital role in controlling human-to-human transmission of a highly contagious disease such as COVID-19. To investigate the benefits and costs of contact tracing in the COVID-19 transmission, we develop an individual-based contact-network model and a susceptible-exposed-infected-confirmed (SEIC) epidemic model. We estimate the unknown parameters (reproductive ratio $R_0$ and confirmed rate $\delta_2$) by using confirmed case data. We model contact tracing in a two-layer network by modifying the basic SEIC epidemic model.