Controlled Testing and Isolation for Suppressing Covid-19

The Corona virus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has significantly affected lives of people around the world. Today, isolation policy is mostly enforced by identifying infected individuals based on symptoms when these appear or by testing people and quarantining those who have been in close contact with infected people. In addition, many countries have imposed complete or partial lock-downs to control the spread of the disease. While lock-downs have succeeded to slow down the spread of the virus, they have devastating effects on the economy and social life. We argue that controlling the spread of the virus can be done by using active feedback to control testing for infection by actively testing individuals with a high probability of being infected. We develop an active testing strategy to achieve this goal, and demonstrate that it would have tremendous success in controlling the spread of the virus. Our results show up to a 50% reduction in quarantine rate and morbidity rate in typical settings as compared to existing methods.