Related papers: Beyond just "flattening the curve": Optimal contro…
Non-pharmaceutical interventions, such as contact tracing and social distancing, are critical for controlling epidemic outbreaks, yet their dynamic interactions remain underexplored. We introduce a probabilistic framework to analyze the…
This paper is concerned with the design of intermittent non-pharmaceutical strategies to mitigate the spread of the COVID-19 epidemic exploiting network epidemiological models. Specifically, by studying a variational equation for the…
Facing a global epidemic of new infectious diseases such as COVID-19, non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs), which reduce transmission rates without medical actions, are being implemented around the world to mitigate spreads. One of the…
We consider the problem of controlling the propagation of an epidemic outbreak in an arbitrary contact network by distributing vaccination resources throughout the network. We analyze a networked version of the…
Restrictions on social and economic activities, as well as vaccinations, have been a key intervention in containing the COVID-19 epidemic. Our work focuses on better understanding the options available to policymakers under the conditions…
Frequent emergence of communicable diseases has been a major concern worldwide. Lack of sufficient resources to mitigate the disease-burden makes the situation even more challenging for lower-income countries. Hence, strategy development…
Modelling epidemics via classical population-based models suffers from shortcomings that so-called individual-based models are able to overcome, as they are able to take heterogeneity features into account, such as super-spreaders, and…
We consider the SEIR compartmental epidemic model subject to state and input constraints (a cap on the proportion of infectious individuals and limits on the allowed social distancing and quarantining measures, respectively). We present a…
Balancing the societal costs of non-pharmaceutical interventions with epidemic suppression requires adaptive feedback control. Rather than relying on state-dependent operational caps, we formulate an infinite-horizon optimal control problem…
In this paper we conduct a simulation study of the spread of an epidemic like COVID-19 with temporary immunity on finite spatial and non-spatial network models. In particular, we assume that an epidemic spreads stochastically on a…
Social distancing has been enacted in order to mitigate the spread of COVID-19. Like many authors, we adopt the classic epidemic SIR model, where the infection rate is the control variable. Its differential flatness property yields ele…
This paper investigates a behavioral-feedback SIR model in which the infection rate adapts dynamically based on the fractions of susceptible and infected individuals. We introduce an invariant of motion and we characterize the peak of…
We study a multi-type SIR epidemic process among a heterogeneous population that interacts through a network. When we base social contact on a random graph with given vertex degrees, we give limit theorems on the fraction of infected…
Optimal control of interdependent epidemics spreading over complex networks is a critical issue. We first establish a framework to capture the coupling between two epidemics, and then analyze the system's equilibrium states by categorizing…
Since early 2020, the world has been dealing with a raging pandemic outbreak: COVID-19. A year later, vaccines have become accessible, but in limited quantities, so that governments needed to devise a strategy to decide which part of the…
Epidemic control frequently relies on adjusting interventions based on prevalence. But designing such policies is a highly non-trivial problem due to uncertain intervention effects, costs and the difficulty of quantifying key transmission…
In the context of the recent COVID-19 outbreak, quarantine has been used to "flatten the curve" and slow the spread of the disease. In this paper, we show that this is not the only benefit of quarantine for the mitigation of an SIR epidemic…
The aim of this paper is to provide a rigorous mathematical analysis of an optimal control problem of a SIR epidemic on an infinite horizon. A state constraint related to intensive care units (ICU) capacity is imposed and the objective…
After the first lockdown in response to the COVID-19 outbreak, many countries faced difficulties in balancing infection control with economics. Due to limited prior knowledge, economists began researching this issue using cost-benefit…
The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has overwhelmingly demonstrated the need to accurately evaluate the effects of implementing new or altering existing nonpharmaceutical interventions. Since these interventions applied at the societal level…