Related papers: Will the announced influenza pandemic really happe…
Numerous studies have attempted to model the effect of mass media on the transmission of diseases such as influenza, however quantitative data on media engagement has until recently been difficult to obtain. With the recent explosion of…
A zombie apocalypse is one pandemic that would likely be worse than anything humanity has ever seen. However, despite the mechanisms for zombie uprisings in pop culture, it is unknown whether zombies, from an evolutionary point of view, can…
Influenza epidemics result in a public health and economic burden around the globe. Traditional surveillance techniques, which rely on doctor visits, provide data with a delay of 1-2 weeks. A means of obtaining real-time data and…
The seasonality of respiratory diseases (common cold, influenza, etc.) is a well-known phenomenon studied from ancient times. The development of predictive models is still not only an actual unsolved problem of mathematical epidemiology but…
Pandemic influenza has the epidemic potential to kill millions of people. While various preventive measures exist (i.a., vaccination and school closures), deciding on strategies that lead to their most effective and efficient use remains…
Recent outbreaks of monkeypox and Ebola, and worrying waves of COVID-19, influenza and respiratory syncytial virus, have all led to a sharp increase in the use of epidemiological models to estimate key epidemiological parameters. The…
Using a simple economic model in which social-distancing reduces contagion, we study the implications of waning immunity for the epidemiological dynamics and social activity. If immunity wanes, we find that COVID-19 likely becomes endemic…
Scientific advice to the UK government throughout the COVID-19 pandemic has been informed by ensembles of epidemiological models provided by members of the Scientific Pandemic Influenza group on Modelling (SPI-M). Among other applications,…
We focus on the statistics of word occurrences and of the waiting times between such occurrences in Blogs. Due to the heterogeneity of words' frequencies, the empirical analysis is performed by studying classes of "frequently-equivalent"…
Infectious disease outbreaks recapitulate biology: they emerge from the multi-level interaction of hosts, pathogens, and their shared environment. As a result, predicting when, where, and how far diseases will spread requires a complex…
Individual probabilities refer to the probabilities of outcomes that are realized only once: the probability that it will rain tomorrow, the probability that Alice will die within the next 12 months, the probability that Bob will be…
Towards the end of an infectious disease outbreak, when a period has elapsed without new case notifications, a key question for public health policy makers is whether the outbreak can be declared over. This requires the benefits of a…
Conventional surveillance systems for monitoring infectious diseases, such as influenza, face challenges due to shortage of skilled healthcare professionals, remoteness of communities and absence of communication infrastructures.…
Seasonal influenza infects between 10 and 50 million people in the United States every year, overburdening hospitals during weeks of peak incidence. Named by the CDC as an important tool to fight the damaging effects of these epidemics,…
This document is another installment in a series of near real-time weekly influenza forecasts made during the 2012-2013 influenza season. Here we present some of the results of forecasts initiated following assimilation of observations for…
A model based on a thermodynamic approach is proposed for predicting the dynamics of communicable epidemics in a city, when the epidemic is governed by controlling efforts of multiple scales so that an entropy is associated with the system.…
The rapid outbreak of bird flu challenges the outcome of effective vaccine for the upcoming years. The recent research established different norms to eliminate flu pandemics. This can be made possible with skilled experimental analyses and…
Understanding the timing of the peak of a disease outbreak forms an important part of epidemic forecasting. In many cases, such information is essential for planning increased hospital bed demand and for designing of public health…
A simple 3-parameter random walk model for monthly fluctuations $\triangle T$ of a temperature $T$ is introduced. Applied to a time range of 170 years, temperature fluctuations of the model produce for about 14\% of the runs warming that…
Background: Influenza A/H3N2 has been circulating in humans since 1968, causing considerable morbidity and mortality. Although H3N2 incidence is highly seasonal, how such seasonality contributes to global phylogeographic migration dynamics…