Related papers: Impact of sudden mass mortality on suicides
Models for epidemic spread typically account for variable risk factors but do not account for the correlation between behavior and risk. Here we extend these models to account for such correlations. We find that a positive correlation…
While most mortality rates have decreased in the US, maternal mortality has increased and is among the highest of any OECD nation. Extensive public health research is ongoing to better understand the characteristics of communities with…
In a recent article in PNAS, Case and Deaton show a figure illustrating "a marked increase in the all-cause mortality of middle-aged white non-Hispanic men and women in the United States between 1999 and 2013." The authors state that their…
Smoking behavior and awareness co-spread through social interactions, giving rise to coupled contagion processes on social contact networks. In addition to initiation and cessation, awareness of the harmful effects of smoking plays an…
We make use of information provided in the titles and abstracts of over half a million publications that were published by the American Physical Society during the past 119 years. By identifying all unique words and phrases and determining…
The fitness of a biological strategy is typically measured by its expected reproductive rate, the first moment of its offspring distribution. However, strategies with high expected rates can also have high probabilities of extinction. A…
We study a behavioral SIR model with time-varying costs of distancing. The two main causes of the variation in the cost of distancing we explore are distancing fatigue and public policies (lockdowns). We show that for a second wave of an…
In this work we consider a model of epidemic spreading coupled with an opinion dynamics in a fully-connected population. Regarding the opinion dynamics, the individuals may be in two distinct states, namely in favor or against a vaccination…
Worldwide, many millions of people die suddenly and unexpectedly each year, either with or without a prior history of cardiovascular disease. Such events are sparse (once in a lifetime), many victims will not have had prior investigations…
In the absence of pharmaceutical interventions to curb the spread of COVID-19, countries relied on a number of nonpharmaceutical interventions to fight the first wave of the pandemic. The most prevalent one has been stay-at-home orders,…
This paper generalizes a previously published differential equation that describes the relation between the age-specific incidence, remission, and mortality of a disease with its prevalence. The underlying model is a simple compartment…
The ongoing pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019-2020 (COVID-19) is caused by Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). This pathogenic virus is able to spread asymptotically during its incubation stage through a…
A second wave of SARS-CoV-2 is unfolding in dozens of countries. However, this second wave manifests itself strongly in new reported cases, but less in death counts compared to the first wave. Over the past three months in Germany, the…
We present a stochastic differential equation model of suicidal progression in U.S. veterans, simulating transitions across mental health states under dynamic stress and covariate influence. Transition rates are modulated by an…
Excess mortality is defined as an increase in the number of deaths above what is expected based on historical trends, hereafter called baseline. In a previous paper, we introduced a statistical method that allows an unbiased and robust…
In recent years, improvements in all-cause mortality rates and life expectancies for males and females in England and Wales have slowed down. In this paper, cause-specific mortality data for England and Wales from 2001 to 2018 are used to…
We investigate stochastic extinction in an epidemic model and the impact of random vaccinations in large populations. We show that, in the absence of vaccinations, the effective entropic barrier for extinction displays scaling with the…
Face-to-face social interactions are an important aspect of peoples' social lives. A lack of interactions can explain how individuals develop depressive symptoms, but depressive symptoms can also explain how individuals engage in social…
The well-known Simpson's Paradox, or Yule-Simpson Effect, in statistics is often illustrated by the following thought experiment: A drug may be found in a trial to increase the survival rate for both men and women, but decrease the rate for…
Suppose, contrary to fact, in 1950, we had put the cohort of 18 year old non-smoking American men on a stringent mandatory diet that guaranteed that no one would ever weigh more than their baseline weight established at age 18. How would…