Effect of diagnostic testing on the isolation rate in a compartmental model with asymptomatic groups.

We present two epidemiological models, which extend the classical SEIR model by accounting for the effect of indiscriminate quarantining, isolation of infected individuals based on testing and the presence of asymptomatic individuals. Given a constraint that limits the maximal number of simultaneous active cases, we demonstrate that the isolation rate, which enforces this constraint, decreases with the increasing testing rate. The models predict that massive testing allows to control the infection spread using a much lower isolation rate than in the case of indiscriminate quarantining. We also show that dynamics of infection are more sensitive to the parameters of the asymptomatic groups than the corresponding parameters of the symptomatic groups.