Related papers: Estimating within-household contact networks from …
The ability to directly record human face-to-face interactions increasingly enables the development of detailed data-driven models for the spread of directly transmitted infectious diseases at the scale of individuals. Complete coverage of…
Many datasets describing contacts in a population suffer from incompleteness due to population sampling and underreporting of contacts. Data-driven simulations of spreading processes using such incomplete data lead to an underestimation of…
Contact patterns in populations fundamentally influence the spread of infectious diseases. Current mathematical methods for epidemiological forecasting on networks largely assume that contacts between individuals are fixed, at least for the…
When a new infectious disease (or a new strain of an existing one) emerges, as in the recent COVID-19 pandemic, different types of mobility restrictions are considered to slow down or mitigate the spread of the disease. The measures to be…
The spread of infectious diseases crucially depends on the pattern of contacts among individuals. Knowledge of these patterns is thus essential to inform models and computational efforts. Few empirical studies are however available that…
Physical contacts result in the spread of various phenomena such as viruses, gossips, ideas, packages and marketing pamphlets across a population. The spread depends on how people move and co-locate with each other, or their mobility…
Social contact surveys are an important tool to assess infection risks within populations, and the effect of non-pharmaceutical interventions on social behaviour during disease outbreaks, epidemics, and pandemics. Numerous longitudinal…
The modeling of the spreading of communicable diseases has experienced significant advances in the last two decades or so. This has been possible due to the proliferation of data and the development of new methods to gather, mine and…
The collection of updated data on social contact patterns following the COVID-19 pandemic disruptions is crucial for future epidemiological assessments and evaluating non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) based on physical distancing. We…
In this paper, we present a simple method to integrate risk-contact data, obtained via digital contact monitoring (DCM) apps, in conventional compartmental transmission models. During the recent COVID-19 pandemic, many such data have been…
Several studies have investigated human interaction using modern tracking techniques for face-to-face encounters across various settings and age groups. However, little attention has been given to understanding how individual…
Understanding how age-specific social contact patterns and susceptibility influence infectious disease transmission is crucial for accurate epidemic modeling. This study presents an eigenvector-based sensitivity analysis framework to…
Routine public health surveillance of notifiable infectious diseases gives rise to weekly counts of reported cases -- possibly stratified by region and/or age group. We investigate how an age-structured social contact matrix can be…
The possibility to analyze, quantify and forecast epidemic outbreaks is fundamental when devising effective disease containment strategies. Policy makers are faced with the intricate task of drafting realistically implementable policies…
Global strategies to contain a pandemic, such as social distancing and protective measures, are designed to reduce the overall transmission rate between individuals. Despite such measures, essential institutions, including hospitals,…
This paper develops nonparametric methods for the survival analysis of epidemic data based on contact intervals. The contact interval from person i to person j is the time between the onset of infectiousness in i and infectious contact from…
A stochastic epidemic model is defined in which each individual belongs to a household, a secondary grouping (typically school or workplace) and also the community as a whole. Moreover, infectious contacts take place in these three settings…
Epidemic control is of great importance for human society. Adjusting interacting partners is an effective individualized control strategy. Intuitively, it is done either by shortening the interaction time between susceptible and infected…
Accounting for population age structure and age-specific contact patterns is crucial for accurate modelling of human infectious disease dynamics and impact. A common approach is to use contact matrices, which estimate the number of contacts…
A probabilistic approach to the epidemic evolution on realistic social-contact networks allows for characteristic differences among subjects, including the individual number and structure of social contacts, and the heterogeneity of the…