Related papers: Privacy Preservation in Epidemic Data Collection

Social distancing has been the only effective way to contain the spread of an infectious disease prior to the availability of the pharmaceutical treatment. It can lower the infection rate of the disease at the economic cost. A pandemic…

Controlling the spread of infectious diseases, such as the ongoing SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, is one of the most challenging problems for human civilization. The world is more populous and connected than ever before, and therefore, the rate of…

The SARS-CoV-2 (Covid-19) pandemic has caused significant strain on public health institutions around the world. Contact tracing is an essential tool to change the course of the Covid-19 pandemic. Manual contact tracing of Covid-19 cases…

COVID-19 remains a challenging global threat with ongoing waves of infections and clinical disease which have resulted millions of deaths and an enormous strain on health systems worldwide. Effective vaccines have been developed for the…

As we enter the control phase of the COVID-19 pandemic, many efforts have been dedicated to developing smartphone-based contact tracing apps in order to automatically identify people that a person with COVID-19 might have infected. These…

Since the global spread of Covid-19 began to overwhelm the attempts of governments to conduct manual contact-tracing, there has been much interest in using the power of mobile phones to automate the contact-tracing process through the…

Infectious diseases are caused by pathogenic microorganisms, such as bacteria, viruses, parasites or fungi, which can be spread, directly or indirectly, from one person to another. Infectious diseases pose a serious threat to human health,…

Large-scale COVID-19 infections have occurred worldwide, which has caused tremendous impact on the economy and people's lives. The traditional method for tracing contagious virus, for example, determining the infection chain according to…

Online data sources offer tremendous promise to demography and other social sciences, but researchers worry that the group of people who are represented in online datasets can be different from the general population. We show that by…

Designing effective strategies for controlling epidemic spread by vaccination is an important question in epidemiology, especially in the early stages when vaccines are limited. This is a challenging question when the contact network is…

Many in the US were reluctant to report their COVID-19 cases at the height of the pandemic (e.g., for fear of missing work or other obligations due to quarantine mandates). Other methods such as using public social media data can therefore…

With more than 1.7 million COVID-19 deaths, identifying effective measures to prevent COVID-19 is a top priority. We developed a mathematical model to simulate the COVID-19 pandemic with digital contact tracing and testing strategies. The…

In this study, we propose a clustering-based approach on time-series data to capture COVID-19 spread patterns in the early period of the pandemic. We analyze the spread dynamics based on the early and post stages of COVID-19 for different…

We provide a rough sketch of a simple system design for exposure notification of COVID-19 infections based on copresence at cluster events -- locations and times where a threshold number of tested-positive (TP) individuals were present.…

Large-scale collection of human behavioral data by companies raises serious privacy concerns. We show that behavior captured in the form of application usage data collected from smartphones is highly unique even in very large datasets…

In the cases when public health authorities confirm a patient with highly contagious disease, they release the summaries about patient locations and travel information. However, due to privacy concerns, these releases do not include the…

Optimizing the impact on the economy of control strategies aiming at containing the spread of COVID-19 is a critical challenge. We use daily new case counts of COVID-19 patients reported by local health administrations from different…

Since the World Health Organization (WHO) characterized COVID-19 as a pandemic in March 2020, there have been over 600 million confirmed cases of COVID-19 and more than six million deaths as of October 2022. The relationship between the…

The eruption of big data with the increasing collection and processing of vast volumes and variety of data have led to breakthrough discoveries and innovation in science, engineering, medicine, commerce, criminal justice, and national…

Different countries -- and sometimes different regions within the same countries -- have adopted different strategies in trying to contain the ongoing COVID-19 epidemic; these mix in variable parts social confinement, early detection and…