Fig 9. Effects of quarantining when the sample is taken.

Including a larger test delay of 5 days for PCR tests while keeping RAT as point-of-care tests diminishes the benefit of having more PCR tests in the mixture, even when their homes are quarantined, as shown in Fig 8C. However, a new quarantining strategy where all tested individuals and homes are quarantined upon taking the test sample until the result is declared can be used to make up for this. The results were found to be qualitatively similar for a delay of 2 days as well, although the relative benefit of quarantining individuals at home was slightly offset by the lower test delay. The plots were obtained after averaging over 100 simulation runs of 200 days each.