For symptomatic cases, it would make sense to contact trace 48 hours back from the onset of symptoms;
For asymptomatic cases, it would make sense to contact trace 48 hours back from the positive test result being received.
The current implementation is always triggered upon a positive test result being received (and hence quarantine scheduled). So if the positive test result is received on a particular day, the system traces the past 24 hours.
To be able to achieve this, the implementation is to require a major change, whereby the contacts older than the last 2 or 3 days would need to be kept (possibly as files). This is because an agent might have had symptoms 4 days ago, been tested 2 days ago, and received the result today (and right now I am keeping contacts and indices up to the last 2/3 days).
The trigger would still remain as is today, i.e. when the positive test result is received. However, the actual contact tracing would happen by loading older contacts from file (which right now are being deleted).
Contact tracing days being set to 2 (instead of 1), i.e. 48 hours instead of 24 hours, is likely to provide better results too, because it considers a longer time period. Case in point, the same day will likely feature less contacts because the agent would have already started quarantining.
An idea would be to add the agent for contact tracing on the day that their infection_type is changed to Symptomatic; however, while this would make it easier to implement and would require less data to be persisted (more or less keep it as is already implemented), it would also make it less realistic because contact tracing in real-life was actually triggered by a positive test result.
For symptomatic cases, it would make sense to contact trace 48 hours back from the onset of symptoms; For asymptomatic cases, it would make sense to contact trace 48 hours back from the positive test result being received.
The current implementation is always triggered upon a positive test result being received (and hence quarantine scheduled). So if the positive test result is received on a particular day, the system traces the past 24 hours.
To be able to achieve this, the implementation is to require a major change, whereby the contacts older than the last 2 or 3 days would need to be kept (possibly as files). This is because an agent might have had symptoms 4 days ago, been tested 2 days ago, and received the result today (and right now I am keeping contacts and indices up to the last 2/3 days).
The trigger would still remain as is today, i.e. when the positive test result is received. However, the actual contact tracing would happen by loading older contacts from file (which right now are being deleted).
Contact tracing days being set to 2 (instead of 1), i.e. 48 hours instead of 24 hours, is likely to provide better results too, because it considers a longer time period. Case in point, the same day will likely feature less contacts because the agent would have already started quarantining.
An idea would be to add the agent for contact tracing on the day that their infection_type is changed to Symptomatic; however, while this would make it easier to implement and would require less data to be persisted (more or less keep it as is already implemented), it would also make it less realistic because contact tracing in real-life was actually triggered by a positive test result.