Related papers: Religious Festivals and Influenza
We predict vaccine efficacy with a measure of antigenic distance between influenza A(H3N2) and candidate vaccine viruses based on amino acid substitutions in the dominant epitopes. In 2016-2017, our model predicts 19% efficacy compared to…
Phylogenetic analyses based on small to moderately sized sets of sequential data lead to overestimating mutation rates in influenza hemagglutinin (HA) by at least an order of magnitude. Two major underlying reasons are: the incomplete…
Most antigenically novel and evolutionarily successful strains of seasonal influenza A (H3N2) originate in East, South, and Southeast Asia. To understand this pattern, we simulated the ecological and evolutionary dynamics of influenza in a…
This large-scale study, consisting of 21.3 million hand hygiene opportunities from 19 distinct facilities in 10 different states, uses linear predictive models to expose factors that may affect hand hygiene compliance. We examine the use of…
This study documents the relationship between computer skills/digital literacy and influenza vaccination take-up among older adults in Europe during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. Using data from the Survey of Health, Aging and Retirement…
For nearly a century, the initial reproduction number (R0) has been used as a one number summary to compare outbreaks of infectious disease, yet there is no `standard' estimator for R0. Difficulties in estimating R0 arise both from how a…
The impact of climate conditions on influenza epidemiology has mostly been studied by addressing a singular aspect of transmission and a climate variable correlating to it. As climate change unfolds at an unprecedented rate, we urgently…
A central challenge in every field of biology is to use existing measurements to predict the outcomes of future experiments. In this work, we consider the wealth of antibody inhibition data against variants of the influenza virus. Due to…
We develop a multiple compartment Susceptible-Infected-Recovered (SIR) model to analyze the spread of several infectious diseases through different geographic areas. Additionally, we propose a data-quality sensitive optimization framework…
Accurate real-time tracking of influenza outbreaks helps public health officials make timely and meaningful decisions that could save lives. We propose an influenza tracking model, ARGO (AutoRegression with GOogle search data), that uses…
This paper uses new and existing methods to study collective trends across countries throughout the pandemic, with a focus on the multivariate time series of reproduction numbers and vaccine proliferation. We begin with a time-varying…
H5N1 highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) has been recently circulating in previously unseen patterns. As the underlying causes are uncertain, we need a better understanding of the drivers of virus circulation, as they underpin the…
Influenza viruses mutate rapidly and can pose a threat to public health, especially to those in vulnerable groups. Throughout history, influenza A viruses have caused pandemics between different species. It is important to identify the…
Global mobility flow data are at the heart of spatial epidemiological models used to predict infectious disease behavior but this wealth of data on human mobility has been largely neglected by reconstructions of pathogen evolutionary…
The vaccination against ongoing epidemics is seldom compulsory but remains one of the most classical means to fight epidemic propagation. However recent debates concerning the innocuity of vaccines and their risk with respect to the risk of…
We provide a brief technical description of an online platform for disease monitoring, titled as the Flu Detector (fludetector.cs.ucl.ac.uk). Flu Detector, in its current version (v.0.5), uses either Twitter or Google search data in…
We define a new parameter to quantify the antigenic distance between two H3N2 influenza strains: we use this parameter to measure antigenic distance between circulating H3N2 strains and the closest vaccine component of the influenza…
Accurate epidemic forecasting is critical for informing public health decisions and timely interventions. While Physics-Informed Neural Networks have shown promise in various scientific domains, their potential application to real-time…
This note describes an integrated recognition system for identifying missing and found objects as well as missing, dead, and found people during Hajj and Umrah seasons in the two Holy cities of Makkah and Madina in the Kingdom of Saudi…
Over the last ten years, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has organized an annual influenza forecasting challenge with the motivation that accurate probabilistic forecasts could improve situational awareness and yield…