Related papers: Digital Herd Immunity and COVID-19
Here we show that herd immunity is not a measure we can implement, trust, control or depend on, and that waiting for herd immunity to play a role is tantamount to hope for the best. Herd immunity is not some protection, as it has been…
We model and calculate the fraction of infected population necessary to reach herd immunity, taking into account the heterogeneity in infectiousness and susceptibility, as well as the correlation between those two parameters. We show that…
In this note we estimate herd immunity levels for the Covid-19 epidemic using a standard SEIR system that models the disease dynamics in homogeneous populations. The results obtained are indicative of values between 80% and 90% for…
The contact structure of a population plays an important role in transmission of infection. Many ``structured models'' capture aspects of the contact structure through an underlying network or a mixing matrix. An important observation in…
When a fraction of a population becomes immune to an infectious disease, the population-wide infection risk decreases nonlinearly due to collective protection, known as herd immunity. Some studies based on mean-field models suggest that…
We consider the spread of epidemics in technological and social networks. How do people react? Does awareness and cautious behavior help? We analyze these questions and present a dynamic model to describe the movement of individuals and/or…
Epidemics generally spread through a succession of waves that reflect factors on multiple timescales. On short timescales, super-spreading events lead to burstiness and overdispersion, while long-term persistent heterogeneity in…
We outline a contact-tracing strategy based on proximity sensing using mobile devices. We discuss what an ideal system should look like and what it can do. We show that, when adopted sufficiently broadly, such a contact-tracing strategy can…
A quantitative COVID-19 model that incorporates hidden asymptomatic patients is developed, and an analytic solution in parametric form is given. The model incorporates the impact of lockdown and resulting spatial migration of population due…
Motivated by the increasing number of COVID-19 cases that have been observed in many countries after the vaccination and relaxation of non-pharmaceutical interventions, we propose a mathematical model on time-varying networks for the spread…
During infectious disease epidemics, pathogen transmission occurs in host populations made up of interacting subpopulations. Using stochastic simulation and analytical approximations, we examine how outbreak sizes in networked populations…
We generalize the Susceptible-Infected-Removed model for epidemics to take into account generic effects of heterogeneity in the degree of susceptibility to infection in the population. We introduce a single new parameter corresponding to a…
We study the influence of the rate of the attainment of herd immunity (HI), in the absence of an approved vaccine, on the vulnerable population. We essentially ask the question: how hard the evolution towards the desired herd immunity could…
We present a detailed analytical and numerical study for the spreading of infections in complex population networks with acquired immunity. We show that the large connectivity fluctuations usually found in these networks strengthen…
We study the critical effect of an intermittent social distancing strategy on the propagation of epidemics in adaptive complex networks. We characterize the effect of our strategy in the framework of the susceptible-infected-recovered…
Using a simple economic model in which social-distancing reduces contagion, we study the implications of waning immunity for the epidemiological dynamics and social activity. If immunity wanes, we find that COVID-19 likely becomes endemic…
An interesting inference drawn by some Covid-19 epidemiological models is that there exists a proportion of the population who are not susceptible to infection -- even at the start of the current pandemic. This paper introduces a model of…
This work is inspired by the outbreak of COVID-19, and some of the challenges we have observed with gathering data about the disease. To this end, we aim to help collect data about citizens and the disease without risking the privacy of…
The shape of an epidemic wave in simple epidemic models applies to a homogeneous distribution of infected people in the population. In large inhomogeneous systems, at country-scale for instance, the wave shape is similar except for the…
Herd immunity is shaped not only by the infection capacity of a spreading epidemic or the contact structure of the hosting population, but also by how and under what circumstances individuals acquire immunity. Immunization strategies may…