Related papers: Evaluating Policies Early in a Pandemic: Bounding …
Pandemic control measures like lock-down, restrictions on restaurants and gatherings, social-distancing have shown to be effective in curtailing the spread of COVID-19. However, their sustained enforcement has negative economic effects. To…
The cataclysmic contagion based calamity -- Covid-19 has shown us a clear need for a comprehensive community based strategy that overcomes the sheer complexity of controlling it and the caveats of current methods. In this regard, as seen in…
A novel coronavirus disease has emerged (later named COVID-19) and caused the world to enter a new reality, with many direct and indirect factors influencing it. Some are human-controllable (e.g. interventional policies, mobility and the…
Testing is a crucial control mechanism in the beginning phase of an epidemic when the vaccines are not yet available. It enables the public health authority to detect and isolate the infected cases from the population, thereby limiting the…
During the Covid-19 pandemic, most governments across the world imposed policies like lock-down of public spaces and restrictions on people's movements to minimize the spread of the virus through physical contact. However, such policies…
Covid-19 vaccination has posed crucial challenges to policymakers and health administrations worldwide. In addition to the pressure posed by the pandemic, government administration has to strive against vaccine hesitancy, which seems to be…
Policymakers commonly employ non-pharmaceutical interventions to manage the scale and severity of pandemics. Of non-pharmaceutical interventions, social distancing policies -- designed to reduce person-to-person pathogenic spread -- have…
I propose novel partial identification bounds on infection prevalence from information on test rate and test yield. The approach utilizes user-specified bounds on (i) test accuracy and (ii) the extent to which tests are targeted, formalized…
Mass antigen testing has been proposed as a possible cost-effective tool to contain the Covid-19 pandemic. We test the impact of a voluntary mass testing campaign implemented in the Italian region of South Tyrol on the spread of the virus…
We identify the effectiveness of social distancing policies in reducing the transmission of the COVID-19 spread. We build a model that measures the relative frequency and geographic distribution of the virus growth rate and provides…
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 potential waning of the vaccination immunity to COVID-19 could pose threats to public health, as it is tenable that the timing of such waning would synchronize with the near-complete restoration of normalcy. Should also testing be…
The current pandemic has introduced substantial uncertainty to traditional methods for demand planning. These uncertainties stem from the disease progression, government interventions, economy and consumer behavior. While most of the…
A deterministic model with testing of infected individuals has been proposed to investigate the potential consequences of the impact of testing strategy. The model exhibits global dynamics concerning the disease-free and a unique endemic…
The COVID-19 pandemic has plagued the world for months. The U.S. has taken measures to counter it. On a daily basis, newly confirmed cases have been reported. In the early days, these numbers showed an increasing trend. Recently, the…
Pooled testing offers an efficient solution to the unprecedented testing demands of the COVID-19 pandemic, although with potentially lower sensitivity and increased costs to implementation in some settings. Assessments of this trade-off…
We develop a statistical model for the testing of disease prevalence in a population. The model assumes a binary test result, positive or negative, but allows for biases in sample selection and both type I (false positive) and type II…
During the COVID-19 pandemic, case isolation emerged as a key non-pharmaceutical intervention in pandemic response. Its effectiveness hinges on the timing of isolation, which is often dictated by the onset of contagiousness. While…
Are COVID-19 fatalities large when a federal government does not enforce containment policies and instead allow states to implement their own policies? We answer this question by developing a stochastic extension of a SIRD epidemiological…
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…