Related papers: Prevention versus treatment: A game-theoretic appr…
The abrupt outbreak and transmission of biological diseases has always been a long-time concern of humankind. For long, mathematical modeling has served as a simple and yet efficient tool to investigate, predict, and control spread of…
Pathogen introduction in plant communities can cause serious impact and biodiversity losses that may take long time to manage and restore. Effective control of epidemic spreading in the wild is a problem of paramount importance, because of…
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…
Combating an epidemic entails finding a plan that describes when and how to apply different interventions, such as mask-wearing mandates, vaccinations, school or workplace closures. An optimal plan will curb an epidemic with minimal loss of…
Mathematical models of infectious diseases, which are in principle analytically tractable, use two general approaches. The first approach, generally known as compartmental modeling, addresses the time evolution of disease propagation at the…
Often, vaccination programs are carried out based on self-interest rather than being mandatory. Owing to the perceptions about risks associated with vaccines and the `herd immunity' effect, it may provide suboptimal vaccination coverage for…
We propose an epidemic model for the spread of vector-borne diseases. The model, which is built extending the classical susceptible-infected-susceptible model, accounts for two populations -- humans and vectors -- and for cross-contagion…
Many applied decision-making problems have a dynamic component: The policymaker needs not only to choose whom to treat, but also when to start which treatment. For example, a medical doctor may choose between postponing treatment (watchful…
Epidemiologists have a growing interest in employing computational approaches to solve analytic problems, with simulation being arguably the most accessible among all approaches. While previous literature discussed the utility of simulation…
A key challenge in responding to public health crises such as COVID-19 is the difficulty of predicting the results of feedback interconnections between the disease and society. As a step towards understanding these interconnections, we pose…
In order to model an epidemic, different approaches can be adopted. Mainly, the deterministic approach and the stochastic one. Recently, a large amount of literature has been published using the two approaches. The aim of this paper is to…
A simple, but ``classical``, stochastic model for epidemic spread in a finite, but large, population is studied. The progress of the epidemic can be divided into three different phases that requires different tools to analyse. Initially the…
Analysis of policies for managing epidemics require simultaneously an economic and epidemiological perspective. We adopt a cost-of-policy framework to model both the virus spread and the cost of handling the pandemic. Because it is harder…
Compartmental models have long served as important tools in mathematical epidemiology, with their usefulness highlighted by the recent COVID-19 pandemic. However, most of the classical models fail to account for certain features of this…
Human diseases spread over networks of contacts between individuals and a substantial body of recent research has focused on the dynamics of the spreading process. Here we examine a model of two competing diseases spreading over the same…
We introduce a 2-layer network model for the study of the immunization dynamics in epidemics. Spreading of an epidemic is modeled as an excitatory process in a small-world network (body layer) while immunization by prevention for the…
We investigate methods to vaccinate contact networks -- i.e. removing nodes in such a way that disease spreading is hindered as much as possible -- with respect to their cost-efficiency. Any real implementation of such protocols would come…
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…
In recent years, epidemic policy-making models are increasingly being used to provide reference for governors on prevention and control policies against catastrophic epidemics such as SARS, H1N1 and COVID-19. Existing studies are currently…
Evolutionary game theory is a powerful framework for studying evolution in populations of interacting individuals. A common assumption in evolutionary game theory is that interactions are symmetric, which means that the players are…