A vaccine or medicine that could reduce the infectious period of COVID-19 in patients even by a single day, could potentially prevent millions of cases and save billions of dollars, suggests a new modelling study published in the journal PLOS Computational Biology.

Investigators created a computational model that simulates the spread of SARS-CoV-2 and used it to evaluate how a vaccine or medication that can decrease the contagious period might mitigate the clinical and economic impact of the disease. The study revealed that reducing the contagious period by half a day could fend off up to 1.4 million cases and more than 99,000 hospitalizations even if only one-fourth of people with symptoms were treated. Reducing the contagious period by 3.5 days could avoid up to 7.4 million cases… (HT – PTI, January 8, 2021)