Related papers: Beyond Contact Tracing: Community-Based Early Dete…
Contact tracing has been extensively studied from different perspectives in recent years. However, there is no clear indication of why this intervention has proven effective in some epidemics (SARS) and mostly ineffective in some others…
Human mobility is one of the key factors at the basis of the spreading of diseases in a population. Containment strategies are usually devised on movement scenarios based on coarse-grained assumptions. Mobility phone data provide a unique…
The 2014 epidemic of the Ebola virus is governed by a genetically diverse viral population. In the early Sierra Leone outbreak, a recent study has identified new mutations that generate genetically distinct sequence clades. Here we find…
Mitigation strategies that remove infectious individuals from the greater population have to balance their efficacy with the economic effects associated with quarantine and have to contend with the limited resources available to the public…
Epidemic outbreaks are an important healthcare challenge, especially in developing countries where they represent one of the major causes of mortality. Approaches that can rapidly target subpopulations for surveillance and control are…
When analysing new emerging infectious disease outbreaks one typically has observational data over a limited period of time and several parameters to estimate, such as growth rate, R0, serial or generation interval distribution, latent and…
Much effort has been directed towards using mathematical models to understand and predict contagious disease, in particular Ebola outbreaks. Classical SIR (susceptible-infected-recovered) compartmental models capture well the dynamics of…
We present a method for estimating epidemic parameters in network-based stochastic epidemic models when the total number of infections is assumed to be small. We illustrate the method by reanalyzing the data from the 2014 Democratic…
We present a comparison between two different mathematical models used in the description of the Ebola virus propagation currently occurring in West Africa. In order to improve the prediction and the control of the propagation of the virus,…
We study the effects of switching social contacts as a strategy to control epidemic outbreaks. Connections between susceptible and infective individuals can be broken by either individual, and then reconnected to a randomly chosen member of…
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…
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…
Non-pharmaceutical interventions, such as contact tracing and social distancing, are critical for controlling epidemic outbreaks, yet their dynamic interactions remain underexplored. We introduce a probabilistic framework to analyze the…
As of October 12, 2018, 211 cases of Ebola virus disease (EVD) were reported in North Kivu Province, Democratic Republic of Congo. Since the beginning of October the outbreak has largely shifted into regions in which active armed conflict…
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…
Recent outbreaks of Ebola and Dengue viruses have again elevated the significance of the capability to quickly predict disease spread in an emergent situation. However, existing approaches usually rely heavily on the time-consuming census…
Physical contact remains difficult to trace in large metropolitan networks, though it is a key vehicle for the transmission of contagious outbreaks. Co-presence encounters during daily transit use provide us with a city-scale time-resolved…
The Ebola Virus Disease (EVD) can persist in some body fluids after clinical recovery. In Guinea and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, there are well-documented cases of EVD reemergence that were associated with previous outbreaks. In…
Background: While many infectious disease epidemics are initially characterized by an exponential growth in time, we show that district-level Ebola virus disease (EVD) outbreaks in West Africa follow slower polynomial-based growth kinetics…
We propose to utilize mobile phone technology as a vehicle for people to report their symptoms and to receive immediate feedback about the health services readily available, and for predicting spatial disease outbreak risk. Once symptoms…