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A Partially Observable MDP Approach for Sequential Testing for Infectious Diseases such as COVID-19

The outbreak of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) is unfolding as a major international crisis whose influence extends to every aspect of our daily lives. Effective testing allows infected individuals to be quarantined, thus reducing the spread of COVID-19, saving countless lives, and helping to restart the economy safely and securely. Developing a good testing strategy can be greatly aided by contact tracing that provides health care providers information about the whereabouts of infected patients in order to determine whom to test. Countries that have been more successful in corralling the virus typically use a ``test, treat, trace, test'' strategy that begins with testing individuals with symptoms, traces contacts of positively tested individuals via a combinations of patient memory, apps, WiFi, GPS, etc., followed by testing their contacts, and repeating this procedure. The problem is that such strategies are myopic and do not efficiently use the testing resources. This is especially the case with COVID-19, where symptoms may show up several days after the infection (or not at all, there is evidence to suggest that many COVID-19 carriers are asymptotic, but may spread the virus). Such greedy strategies, miss out population areas where the virus may be dormant and flare up in the future. In this paper, we show that the testing problem can be cast as a sequential learning-based resource allocation problem with constraints, where the input to the problem is provided by a time-varying social contact graph obtained through various contact tracing tools. We then develop efficient learning strategies that minimize the number of infected individuals. These strategies are based on policy iteration and look-ahead rules. We investigate fundamental performance bounds, and ensure that our solution is robust to errors in the input graph as well as in the tests themselves.

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