Related papers: Estimating the prevalence of infectious diseases f…
Nowcasting and forecasting of epidemic spreading rely on incidence series of reported cases to derive the fundamental epidemiological parameters for a given pathogen. Two relevant drawbacks for predictions are the unknown fractions of…
One of the most significant challenges in combating against the spread of infectious diseases was the difficulty in estimating the true magnitude of infections. Unreported infections could drive up disease spread, making it very hard to…
Accurate forecasts for COVID-19 are necessary for better preparedness and resource management. Specifically, deciding the response over months or several months requires accurate long-term forecasts which is particularly challenging as the…
Quantifying the attack ratio of disease is key to epidemiological inference and Public Health planning. For multi-serotype pathogens, however, different levels of serotype-specific immunity make it difficult to assess the population at…
Fitting Susceptible-Infected-Recovered (SIR) models to incidence data is problematic when not all infected individuals are reported. Assuming an underlying SIR model with general but known distribution for the time to recovery, this paper…
In times of outbreaks, an essential requirement for better monitoring is the evaluation of the number of undiagnosed infected individuals. An accurate estimate of this fraction is crucial for the assessment of the situation and the…
The COVID-19 pandemic has caused major disturbance to human life. An important reason behind the widespread social anxiety is the huge uncertainty about the pandemic. A fundamental uncertainty is how many or what percentage of people have…
To make informative public policy decisions in battling the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, it is important to know the disease prevalence in a population. There are two intertwined difficulties in estimating this prevalence based on testing…
Tuberculosis poses a global health risk and Brazil is among the top twenty countries by absolute mortality. However, this epidemiological burden is masked by under-reporting, which impairs planning for effective intervention. We present a…
Recently, we proposed an state model (compartment model) to describe the progression of a chronic disease with an pre-clinical (undiagnosed) state before clinical diagnosis. It is an open question, if a sequence of cross-sectional studies…
Estimating the prevalence of a medical condition, or the proportion of the population in which it occurs, is a fundamental problem in healthcare and public health. Accurate estimates of the relative prevalence across groups -- capturing,…
We propose a framework for Bayesian non-parametric estimation of the rate at which new infections occur assuming that the epidemic is partially observed. The developed methodology relies on modelling the rate at which new infections occur…
Predicting whether to expect a high incidence of infectious diseases is critical for health surveillance. In the epidemiology of dengue, environmental conditions can significantly impact the transmission of the virus. Utilizing…
Existing methods to estimate the prevalence of chronic hepatitis C (HCV) in New York City (NYC) are limited in scope and fail to assess hard-to-reach subpopulations with highest risk such as injecting drug users (IDUs). To address these…
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…
A key challenge in estimating the infection fatality rate (IFR) -- and its relation with various factors of interest -- is determining the total number of cases. The total number of cases is not known because not everyone is tested, but…
Identifiability is the property in mathematical modelling that determines if model parameters can be uniquely estimated from data. For infectious disease models, failure to ensure identifiability can lead to misleading parameter estimates…
The most frequent infectious diseases in humans - and those with the highest potential for rapid pandemic spread - are usually transmitted via droplets during close proximity interactions (CPIs). Despite the importance of this transmission…
As a consequence of missing data on tests for infection and imperfect accuracy of tests, reported rates of population infection by the SARS CoV-2 virus are lower than actual rates of infection. Hence, reported rates of severe illness…
One of the key indicators used in tracking the evolution of an infectious disease isthe reproduction number. This quantity is usually computed using the reportednumber of cases, but ignoring that many more individuals may be infected…