Related papers: Variable pool testing for infection spread estimat…

Knowing the true effect size of clinical interventions in randomised clinical trials is key to informing the public health policies. Vaccine efficacy is defined in terms of the relative risk or the ratio of two disease risks. However, only…

The experience of Singapur and South Korea makes it clear that under certain circumstances massive testing is an effective way for containing the advance of the COVID-19. In this paper, we propose a modified SEIR model which takes into…

It is crucial for policymakers to understand the community prevalence of COVID-19 so combative resources can be effectively allocated and prioritized during the COVID-19 pandemic. Traditionally, community prevalence has been assessed…

The COVID-19 is sweeping the world with deadly consequences. Its contagious nature and clinical similarity to other pneumonias make separating subjects contracted with COVID-19 and non-COVID-19 viral pneumonia a priority and a challenge.…

The interpretation of sampling data plays a crucial role in policy response to the spread of a disease during an epidemic, such as the COVID-19 epidemic of 2020. However, this is a non-trivial endeavor due to the complexity of real world…

We propose a novel infection spread model based on a random connection graph which represents connections between $n$ individuals. Infection spreads via connections between individuals and this results in a probabilistic cluster formation…

Following [Diggle 2011, Greenland 1995], we give a simple formula for the Bayesian posterior density of a prevalence parameter based on unreliable testing of a population. This problem is of particular importance when the false positive…

With the increasing spread of COVID-19, it is important to systematically test more and more people. The current strategy for test-kit allocation is mostly rule-based, focusing on individuals having (a) symptoms for COVID-19, (b) travel…

During an ongoing epidemic, especially in the case of a new agent, data are partial and sparse, also affected by external factors as for example climatic effects or preparedness and response capability of healthcare structures. Despite that…

Long-term care facilities have been widely affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. Retirement homes are particularly vulnerable due to the higher mortality risk of infected elderly individuals. Once an outbreak occurs, suppressing the spread of…

In one-stage or non-adaptive group testing, instead of testing every sample unit individually, they are split, bundled in pools, and simultaneously tested. The results are then decoded to infer the states of the individual items. This…

Population-wide screening is a powerful tool for controlling infectious diseases. Group testing enables such screening despite limited resources. Viral concentration of pooled samples are often positively correlated, either because…

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…

This paper deals with the problem of estimating variables in nonlinear models for the spread of disease and its application to the COVID-19 epidemic. First unconstrained methods are revisited and they are shown to correspond to the…

The CoVid-19 is spreading pandemically all over the world. A rapid defeat of the pandemic requires carrying out on the population a mass screening, able to separate positive from negative cases. Such a cleaning will free a flow of…

In this paper, we advocate a novel measure for the purpose of checking the quality of a cluster partition for a sample into several distinct classes, and thus, determine the unknown value for the true number of clusters prevailing the…

Polymerase chain reaction (PCR) testing is the gold standard for diagnosing COVID-19. PCR amplifies the virus DNA 40 times to produce measurements of viral loads that span seven orders of magnitude. Unfortunately, the outputs of these tests…

When an infectious disease strikes a population, the number of newly reported cases is often the only available information that one can obtain during early stages of the outbreak. An important goal of early outbreak analysis is to obtain a…

The COVID-19 crisis highlighted the importance of non-medical interventions, such as testing and isolation of infected individuals, in the control of epidemics. Here, we show how to minimize testing needs while maintaining the number of…

The pandemic of COVID-19 has imposed tremendous pressure on public health systems and social economic ecosystems over the past years. To alleviate its social impact, it is important to proactively track the prevalence of COVID-19 within…