LAUSR

As of December 2020, the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID19) pandemic, caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARSCoV-2), continued throughout the United States. The initial COVID-19 pandemic response in most areas focused on mitigation measures—stay at home, social distancing, hand hygiene, face coverings, and limitations on indoor gatherings. However, starting in early summer 2020, many states relaxed some mitigation restrictions and reopened various businesses and other sectors of society. At the same time, many states began implementing a containment strategy of testing, case investigation, contact tracing, and isolation or quarantine. Routine communitybased case investigation and contact tracing are usually successful in limiting transmission by isolating infected people and quarantining named contacts. Occasionally, however, people infected with SARSCoV-2 may interact with many other people at group events, resulting in considerable undetected transmission. Little information or guidance is available to assist communitybased contacttracing programs in developing strategies and interventions to address these group exposure events. In this commentary, we propose a containment strategy that emphasizes the identification of cases at high risk of transmitting the virus to others through their interactions in social gathering groups. For decades, public health programs have used containment strategies to reduce community spread of tuberculosis, HIV, sexually transmitted diseases, and other communicable diseases. For these conditions, the availability of chemoprophylaxis or treatment for identified cases and contacts helps slow and sometimes stop the spread of disease. Although such measures do not yet exist for SARSCoV-2, widespread evidence suggests that containment strategies can limit communitywide transmission.1-6