As COVID-19 spreads around the globe, the governments have imposed quarantines and travel bans on an unprecedented scale. They are often the first response against new infectious diseases. However, these old tools are usually of limited utility for highly transmissible diseases, and if imposed with too heavy a hand, or in too haphazard a manner, they can be counterproductive. In public health practice, “quarantine” refers to the separation of persons who have been exposed to an infectious disease. In order to clarify the extent to which an ideal quarantine measure suppresses epidemics, a review on several studies, considers a simple case in which an individual is detected and its neighbors are promptly quarantined. A well mixed “susceptible exposed infectious recovered” (SEIR) compartmental model was employed to described the dynamics of the COVID-19, and quarantine intervention measures of the authority. Considering infected individuals as contagious during the latency period, the well-mixed SEIR model fitting results based on the assumed contact rates of latent individuals are within 6-18, which represented the possible impact of quarantine and isolation interventions on disease infections. The reviews revealed that by reducing the contact rate of latent individuals, interventions such as quarantine and isolation can effectively reduce the potential peak number of COVID-19 infections and delay the time of peak infection.

Keywords: COVID-19; SEIR compartmental model; Latent individuals; Quarantine; Disease; Contact rate.