Related papers: Calculating effective gun policies
We analyze an optimal control version of a simple SIRS epidemiology model. The policy maker can adopt policies to diminish the contact rate between infected and susceptible individuals, at a specific economic cost. The arrival of a vaccine…
This paper introduces a microscopic approach to model epidemics, which can explicitly consider the consequences of individual's decisions on the spread of the disease. We first formulate a microscopic multi-agent epidemic model where every…
Does having firearms in the home increase suicide risk? To test this hypothesis, a matched case-control study can be performed, in which suicide case subjects are compared to living controls who are similar in observed covariates in terms…
Are COVID-19 fatalities large when a federal government does not enforce containment policies and instead allow states to implement their own policies? We answer this question by developing a stochastic extension of a SIRD epidemiological…
While autonomous agents often surpass humans in their ability to handle vast and complex data, their potential misalignment (i.e., lack of transparency regarding their true objective) has thus far hindered their use in critical applications…
This paper aims to study the economic impact of COVID-19. To do that, in the first step, I showed that the adjusted SEQIER model, which is a generalization form of SEIR model, is a good fit to the real COVID-induced daily death data in a…
Mortality is different across countries, states and regions. Several empirical research works however reveal that mortality trends exhibit a common pattern and show similar structures across populations. The key element in analyzing…
The recent outbreak of the COVID-19 led to the death of millions of people worldwide. To stave off the spread of the virus, the authorities in the US employed different strategies, including the mask mandate order issued by the states'…
We propose a compartmental model for epidemiology wherein the population is split into groups with either comply or refuse to comply with protocols designed to slow the spread of a disease. Parallel to the disease spread, we assume that…
The rapid increase of smoking-related diseases and deaths globally is driving us to find an effective approach to reduce the smoking rate. This study aims to determine whether indoor smoking bans at workplaces can effectively reduce the…
We formulate an optimal control problem to determine the lockdown policy to curb an epidemic where other control measures are not available yet. We present a unified framework to model the epidemic and economy that allows us to study the…
Modelling epidemics via classical population-based models suffers from shortcomings that so-called individual-based models are able to overcome, as they are able to take heterogeneity features into account, such as super-spreaders, and…
Standard measures of effect, including the risk ratio, the odds ratio, and the risk difference, are associated with a number of well-described shortcomings, and no consensus exists about the conditions under which investigators should…
As infectious disease outbreaks emerge, public health agencies often enact vaccination and social distancing measures to slow transmission. Their success depends on not only strategies and resources, but also public adherence. Individual…
This paper presents preliminary summary results from a longitudinal study of participants in seven U.S. states during the COVID-19 pandemic. In addition to standard socio-economic characteristics, we collect data on various economic…
Many widely used models amount to an elaborate means of making up numbers--but once a number has been produced, it tends to be taken seriously and its source (the model) is rarely examined carefully. Many widely used models have little…
Governments across the world are currently facing the task of selecting suitable intervention strategies to cope with the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. This is a highly challenging task, since harsh measures may result in economic…
We study the problem of deriving policies, or rules, that when enacted on a complex system, cause a desired outcome. Absent the ability to perform controlled experiments, such rules have to be inferred from past observations of the system's…
This paper aims to develop practical applications of the model for the highly technical measure-valued populations developed by the authors in \cite{FanEtal20}. We consider the problem of estimation of parameters in the general age and…
The question of selecting the "best" amongst different choices is a common problem in statistics. In drug development, our motivating setting, the question becomes, for example: what is the dose that gives me a pre-specified risk of…