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The optimal control of epidemic-like stochastic processes is important both historically and for emerging applications today, where it can be especially important to include time-varying parameters that impact viral epidemic-like…
As infectious disease outbreaks emerge, public health agencies often enact vaccination and social distancing measures to slow transmission. Their success depends on not only strategies and resources, but also public adherence. Individual…
Given multiple new COVID-19 variants are continuously emerging, non-pharmaceutical interventions are still primary control strategies to curb the further spread of coronavirus. However, implementing strict interventions over extended…
One of the critical measures to control infectious diseases is a lockdown. Once past the lockdown stage in many parts of the world, the crucial question now concerns the effects of relaxing the lockdown and finding the best ways to…
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…
Epidemic risk assessment poses inherent challenges, with traditional approaches often failing to balance health outcomes and economic constraints. This paper presents a data-driven decision support tool that models epidemiological dynamics…
In this paper, we consider an optimal control problem for a prescription opioid epidemic model that describes the interaction between the regular prescription or addictive use of opioid drugs, and the process of rehabilitation and that of…
Epidemiologists have a growing interest in employing computational approaches to solve analytic problems, with simulation being arguably the most accessible among all approaches. While previous literature discussed the utility of simulation…
We consider a model for an epidemic in a population that occupies geographically distinct locations. The disease is spread within subpopulations by contacts between infective and susceptible individuals, and is spread between subpopulations…
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…
Advances in mathematical epidemiology have led to a better understanding of the risks posed by epidemic spreading and informed strategies to contain disease spread. However, a challenge that has been overlooked is that, as a disease becomes…
The importance of a strict quarantine has been widely debated during the COVID-19 epidemic even from the purely epidemiological point of view. One argument against strict lockdown measures is that once the strict quarantine is lifted, the…
National responses to the Covid-19 pandemic varied markedly across countries, from business-as-usual to complete shutdowns. Policies aimed at disrupting the viral transmission cycle and preventing the healthcare system from being…
We study the effects of switching social contacts as a strategy to control epidemic outbreaks. Connections between susceptible and infective individuals can be broken by either individual, and then reconnected to a randomly chosen member of…
Research in epidemiology often focusses on designing interventions that result in the number of infected individuals asymptotically approaching zero, without considering that this number may peak at high values during transients. Recent…
We consider the low-prevalence linearized SEIR epidemic model for a society that has resolved to keep future infections low in anticipation of a vaccine. The society can vary its amount of potentially-infection-spreading activity over time,…
We consider epidemic extinction in finite networks with broad variation in local connectivity. Generalizing the theory of large fluctuations to random networks with a given degree distribution, we are able to predict the most probable, or…
As the world fights to contain and control the spread of the Novel Coronavirus, countries are imposing severe measures from restrictions on travel and social gatherings to complete lockdowns. Lockdowns, though effective in controlling the…
Epidemic outbreaks in human populations are facilitated by the underlying transportation network. We consider strategies for containing a viral spreading process by optimally allocating a limited budget to three types of protection…
We apply optimal control theory to a tuberculosis model given by a system of ordinary differential equations. Optimal control strategies are proposed to minimize the cost of interventions, considering reinfection and post-exposure…