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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…
Detecting changes in COVID-19 disease transmission over time is a key indicator of epidemic growth.Near real-time monitoring of the pandemic growth is crucial for policy makers and public health officials who need to make informed decisions…
The synthetic control method is an empirical methodology forcausal inference using observational data. By observing thespread of COVID-19 throughout the world, we analyze the dataon the number of deaths and cases in different regions…
The screening testing is an effective tool to control the early spread of an infectious disease such as COVID-19. When the total testing capacity is limited, we aim to optimally allocate testing resources among n counties. We build a…
Controlling the COVID-19 pandemic is an urgent global challenge. The rapid geographic spread of SARS-CoV-2 directly reflects the social structure. Before effective vaccines and treatments are widely available, we have to rely on…
We have established a novel mathematical model that considers various aspects of the spreading of the virus, including, the transmission based on being in the latent period, environment to human transmission, governmental decisions, and…
Monitoring key elements of disease dynamics (e.g., prevalence, case counts) is of great importance in infectious disease prevention and control, as emphasized during the COVID-19 pandemic. To facilitate this effort, we propose a new…
As the interactions between people increases, the impending menace of COVID-19 outbreaks materialize, and there is an inclination to apply lockdowns. In this context, it is essential to have easy-to-use indicators for people to use as a…
A primary indicator of success in the fight against COVID-19 is avoiding stress on critical care infrastructure and services (CCIS). However, CCIS will likely remain stressed until sustained herd immunity is built. There are also secondary…
The COVID-19 pandemic has, worldwide and up to December 2020, caused over 1.7 million deaths, and put the world's most advanced healthcare systems under heavy stress. In many countries, drastic restrictive measures adopted by political…
We present a simple technique to compare the development of the Covid-19 epidemic in different regions, based only on the time series of confirmed cases. Weekly new infections, taken for every day, are interpreted as infection potential of…
When testing for a disease such as COVID-19, the standard method is individual testing: we take a sample from each individual and test these samples separately. An alternative is pooled testing (or "group testing"), where samples are mixed…
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.…
Residential colleges and universities face unique challenges in providing in-person instruction during the COVID-19 pandemic. Administrators are currently faced with decisions about whether to open during the pandemic and what modifications…
The COVID-19 crisis has shown that we can only prevent the risk of mass contagion through timely, large-scale, coordinated, and decisive actions. However, frequently the models used by experts [from whom decision-makers get their main…
The COVID-19 pandemic left its unique mark on the 21st century as one of the most significant disasters in history, triggering governments all over the world to respond with a wide range of interventions. However, these restrictions come…
There has been much recent interest in screening populations for an infectious disease. Here, we present a stochastic-control model, wherein the optimum screening policy is provably difficult to find, but wherein Thompson sampling has…
Compartmental models are used in epidemiology to capture the evolution of infectious diseases such as COVID-19 in a population by assigning members of it to compartments with labels such as susceptible, infected, and recovered. In a…
In this study, we analyze the effectiveness of measures aimed at finding and isolating infected individuals to contain epidemics like COVID-19, as the suppression induced over the effective reproduction number. We develop a mathematical…
We consider the problem of deciding how best to target and prioritize existing vaccines that may offer protection against new variants of an infectious disease. Sequential experiments are a promising approach; however, challenges due to…