Related papers: Mitigation of infectious disease at school: target…
Mitigation measures are essential for controlling the spread of infectious diseases during pandemics and epidemics, but they impose considerable societal, individual, and economic costs. We developed a general optimization framework to…
Little quantitative information is available on the mixing patterns of children in school environments. Describing and understanding contacts between children at school would help quantify the transmission opportunities of respiratory…
Mathematical models of infectious diseases are frequently used as a tool to support public health policy and decisions around implementation of interventions such as school closures. However, most publications on policy-relevant modelling…
The COVID-19 pandemic began over two years ago, yet schools, businesses, and other organizations are still struggling to keep the risk of disease outbreak low while returning to (near) normal functionality. Observations from these past…
In real social networks, person-to-person interactions are known to be heterogeneous, which can affect the way a disease spreads through a population, reaches a tipping point in the fraction of infected individuals, and becomes an epidemic.…
A number of theoretical models have been developed in recent years modelling epidemic spread in educational settings such as universities to help inform re-opening strategies during the Covid-19 pandemic. However, these studies have had…
We aim at clarifying the controversy about the effects of school openings or closures on the course of the Covid-19 pandemic. The mathematical analysis of compartmental models with subpopulations shows that the in-school contact rates…
Containing an epidemic at its origin is the most desirable mitigation. Epidemics have often originated in rural areas, with rural communities among the first affected. Disease dynamics in rural regions have received limited attention, and…
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…
Contact tracing, the practice of isolating individuals who have been in contact with infected individuals, is an effective and practical way of containing disease spread. Here, we show that this strategy is particularly effective in the…
It's been controversial whether re-opening school will facilitate viral spread among household communities with mitigation strategies such as mask-wearing in place. In this work, we propose an epidemiological model that explores the viral…
Transmission rates in epidemic outbreaks may vary over time depending on the societal response. Non-pharmacological mitigation strategies such as social distancing and the adoption of protective equipment aim precisely at reducing…
The debate on the role of school closures as a mitigation strategy against the spread of Covid-19 is gaining relevance due to emerging variants in Europe. According to WHO, decisions on schools "should be guided by a risk-based approach".…
In the framework of homogeneous susceptible-infected-recovered (SIR) models, we use a control theory approach to identify optimal pandemic mitigation strategies. We derive rather general conditions for reaching herd immunity while…
Without vaccines and treatments, societies must rely on non-pharmaceutical intervention strategies to control the spread of emerging diseases such as COVID-19. Though complete lockdown is epidemiologically effective, because it eliminates…
Reopening strategies are crucial to balance efforts of economic revitalization and bringing back a sense of normalcy while mitigating outbreaks and effectively flattening the infection curve. This paper proposes practical reopening,…
A key scientific challenge during the outbreak of novel infectious diseases is to predict how the course of the epidemic changes under different countermeasures that limit interaction in the population. Most epidemiological models do not…
More than one billion students are out of school because of Covid-19, forced to a remote learning that has several drawbacks and has been hurriedly arranged; in addition, most countries are currently uncertain on how to plan school…
The way diseases spread through schools, epidemics through countries, and viruses through the Internet is crucial in determining their risk. Although each of these threats has its own characteristics, its underlying network determines the…
In this work we analyze mathematically the consequences and effectiveness of strategies to control an epidemic in the framework of classical SEIR models with multiple parallel infectious stages. We define the mathematical concept of a…