Related papers: Control of epidemics via social partnership adjust…
Optimizing the impact on the economy of control strategies aiming at containing the spread of COVID-19 is a critical challenge. We use daily new case counts of COVID-19 patients reported by local health administrations from different…
Networks of contacts capable of spreading infectious diseases are often observed to be highly heterogeneous, with the majority of individuals having fewer contacts than the mean, and a significant minority having relatively very many…
We present a local spread model of disease transmission on a regular network and compare different control options ranging from treating the whole population to local control in a well-defined neighborhood of an infectious individual.…
In the Staged Progression (SP) epidemic models, infected individuals are classified into a suitable number of states. The goal of these models is to describe as closely as possible the effect of differences in infectiousness exhibited by…
When an unprecedented infectious disease with high mortality and transmissibility emerges, immediate usage of vaccines or medicines is hardly available. Thus, many health authorities rely on non-pharmaceutical interventions through…
Face-to-face social contacts are potentially important transmission routes for acute respiratory infections, and understanding the contact network can improve our ability to predict, contain, and control epidemics. Although workplaces are…
Non-pharmaceutical measures such as preventive quarantines, remote working, school and workplace closures, lockdowns, etc. have shown effectivenness from an epidemic control perspective; however they have also significant negative…
We study equilibrium distancing during epidemics. Distancing reduces the individual's probability of getting infected but comes at a cost. It creates a single-peaked epidemic, flattens the curve and decreases the size of the epidemic. We…
Pandemic control measures like lock-down, restrictions on restaurants and gatherings, social-distancing have shown to be effective in curtailing the spread of COVID-19. However, their sustained enforcement has negative economic effects. To…
An actively controlled Susceptible-Infected-Susceptible (actSIS) contagion model is presented for studying epidemic dynamics with continuous-time feedback control of infection rates. Our work is inspired by the observation that epidemics…
Human behavioral responses play an important role in the impact of disease outbreaks and yet they are often overlooked in epidemiological models. Understanding to what extent behavioral changes determine the outcome of spreading epidemics…
Stochastic modeling of disease dynamics has had a long tradition. Among the first epidemic models including a spatial structure in the form of local interactions is the contact process. In this article we investigate two extensions of the…
We consider the problem of controlling an SIR-model epidemic by temporarily reducing the rate of contact within a population. The control takes the form of a multiplicative reduction in the contact rate of infectious individuals. The…
There has been much recent interest in modelling epidemics on networks, particularly in the presence of substantial clustering. Here, we develop pairwise methods to answer questions that are often addressed using epidemic models, in…
Contact tracing is one of the most important control measures deployed during epidemics. Relying on the identification of contacts of known infected individuals, it necessitates a network perspective. Although pairwise models have been used…
Protecting interventions of many types (both pharmaceutical and non-pharmaceutical) can be deployed against the spreading of a communicable disease, as the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic has dramatically shown. Here we investigate in detail…
Our paper investigates distributions of exposed and infectious time periods in an epidemic model and how applying a disease control strategy affects the model's accuracy. While ordinary differential equations are widely used for their…
Intuitively, sampling is likely to be more efficient for prevalence estimation, if the cases (or positives) have a relatively higher representation in the sample than in the population. In case the virus is transmitted via personal…
Forecasting disease spread is a critical tool to help public health officials design and plan public health interventions. However, the expected future state of an epidemic is not necessarily well defined as disease spread is inherently…
The decision of whether or not to vaccinate is a complex one. It involves the contribution both to a social good -- herd immunity -- and to one's own well being. It is informed by social influence, personal experience, education, and mass…