Related papers: Beyond Contact Tracing: Community-Based Early Dete…
Background: The global spread of the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) epidemic has clearly shown the importance of considering the long-range transportation networks in the understanding of emerging diseases outbreaks. The…
Major advances in public health have resulted from disease prevention. However, prevention of a new infectious disease by vaccination or pharmaceuticals is made difficult by the slow process of vaccine and drug development. We propose an…
Models for control of epidemics on local, global and small-world networks are considered, with only partial information accessible about the status of individuals and their connections. The main goal of an effective control measure is to…
Human mobility is increasing in its volume, speed and reach, leading to the movement and introduction of pathogens through infected travelers. An understanding of how areas are connected, the strength of these connections and how this…
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…
How to avoid a second wave of COVID-19 after reopening the economy is a pressing question. The extremely high basic reproductive number $R_0$ (5.7 to 6.4, shown in new studies) of SARS-CoV-2 further complicates the challenge. Here we assess…
We consider a population that experienced a first wave of infections, interrupted by strong, top-down, governmental restrictions and did not develop a significant immunity to prevent a second wave (i.e. resurgence). As restrictions are…
Introduction. It is well known that social contact patterns differ from country to country. This variation coincides with significant socioeconomic heterogeneity that complicates the design of effective non-pharmaceutical interventions.…
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 studies if and to which extent COVID-19 epidemics can be controlled by authorities taking decisions on public health measures on the basis of daily reports of swab test results, active cases and total cases. A suitably simplified…
The contact structure between hosts has a critical influence on disease spread. However, most networkbased models used in epidemiology tend to ignore heterogeneity in the weighting of contacts. This assumption is known to be at odds with…
Zoonotic diseases spread through pathogens-infected animal carriers. In the case of Ebola Virus Disease (EVD), evidence supports that the main carriers are fruit bats and non-human primates. Further, EVD spread is a multi-factorial problem…
The impact of mitigation or control measures on an epidemics can be estimated by fitting the parameters of a compartmental model to empirical data, and running the model forward with modified parameters that account for a specific measure.…
We study the critical effect of an intermittent social distancing strategy on the propagation of epidemics in adaptive complex networks. We characterize the effect of our strategy in the framework of the susceptible-infected-recovered…
Epidemics of infectious diseases are among the largest threats to the quality of life and the economic and social well-being of developing countries. The arsenal of measures against such epidemics is well-established, but costly and…
Information and epidemic propagation dynamics in complex networks is truly important to discover and control terrorist attack and disease spread. How to track, recognize and model such dynamics is a big challenge. With the popularity of…
As the world grows increasingly connected, infectious disease transmission and outbreaks have become a pressing global concern for public health officials and policymakers. While policy interventions to contain and prevent the spread of…
In early 2014 an outbreak of a slightly mutated Zaire Ebola subtype appeared in West Africa which is less virulent than 1976 and 1994 strains. The numbers of cases per year appear to be ~ 1000 times larger than the earlier strains,…
Recent outbreaks of monkeypox and Ebola, and worrying waves of COVID-19, influenza and respiratory syncytial virus, have all led to a sharp increase in the use of epidemiological models to estimate key epidemiological parameters. The…
Discovering and isolating infected individuals is a cornerstone of epidemic control. Because many infectious diseases spread through close contacts, contact tracing is a key tool for case discovery and control. However, although contact…