Key takeaways:

• COVID-19 vaccines and medications that cannot necessarily prevent or cure may still reduce how long someone is contagious and sheds the virus, which has value.
• The PHICOR team built a computational model that simulated the entire U.S. population, the spread of COVID-19 coronavirus, and the subsequent outcomes of infection (e.g., symptoms, hospitalization) and associated costs along the way.
• Results from the model suggest that:
  • Reducing the contagious period of COVID-19 coronavirus by half a day could avert up to 1.4 million cases and over 99,000 hospitalizations, saving $209.5 billion in direct medical and indirect costs—even if only a quarter of people with symptoms were treated and incorporating conservative estimates of how contagious the virus may be.
  • Under the same circumstances, cutting the contagious period by 3.5 days could avert up to 7.4 million cases. Expanding such treatment to 75 percent of everyone infected could avert 29.7 million cases and save $856 billion.
• These findings could provide benchmarks to aim for when researching and developing vaccines and medications for COVID-19. The findings could also help government agencies plan rollout of such products and provide cost insights to guide reimbursement policies for third-party payers.

Publication link on the IMAG wiki