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We study equilibrium distancing during epidemics. Distancing reduces the individual's probability of getting infected but comes at a cost. It creates a single-peaked epidemic, flattens the curve and decreases the size of the epidemic. We…
Compartmental models are the most widely used framework for modeling infectious diseases. These models have been continuously refined to incorporate all the realistic mechanisms that can shape the course of an epidemic outbreak. Building on…
Major advances in public health have resulted from disease prevention. However, prevention of a new infectious disease by vaccination or pharmaceuticals is made difficult by the slow process of vaccine and drug development. We propose an…
Standard epidemic models exhibit one continuous, second order phase transition to macroscopic outbreaks. However, interventions to control outbreaks may fundamentally alter epidemic dynamics. Here we reveal how such interventions modify the…
Epidemic spreading can be suppressed by the introduction of containment measures such as social distancing and lock downs. Yet, when such measures are relaxed, new epidemic waves and infection cycles may occur. Here we explore this issue in…
Yet often neglected, dynamical interdependencies between concomitant contagion processes can alter their intrinsic equilibria and bifurcations. A particular case of interest for disease control is the emergence of explosive transitions in…
We propose a tractable epidemic model that includes containment measures. In the absence of containment measures, the epidemics spread exponentially fast whenever the infectivity rate is positive, $\lambda>0$. The containment measures are…
Quarantine measures are one of the first lines of defense against the spread of infectious diseases. However, maintaining these measures over extended periods can be challenging due to a phenomenon known as quarantine fatigue. In this…
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…
Epidemic spreading often occurs in spatially heterogeneous environments, yet how quenched heterogeneity reshapes its onset and critical dynamics remains poorly understood. The diffusive epidemic process, a minimal reaction-diffusion model…
Social contact networks underlying epidemic processes in humans and animals are highly dynamic. The spreading of infections on such temporal networks can differ dramatically from spreading on static networks. We theoretically investigate…
Contact tracing has been extensively studied from different perspectives in recent years. However, there is no clear indication of why this intervention has proven effective in some epidemics (SARS) and mostly ineffective in some others…
We study the relative importance of two key control measures for epidemic spreading: endogenous social self-distancing and exogenous imposed quarantine. We use the framework of adaptive networks, moment-closure, and ordinary differential…
The outbreak of an infectious disease in a human population can lead to individuals responding with preventive measures in an attempt to avoid getting infected. This leads to changes in contact patterns. However, as we show in this paper,…
Testing is a crucial control mechanism for an epidemic outbreak because it enables the health authority to detect and isolate the infected cases, thereby limiting the disease transmission to susceptible people, when no effective treatment…
To contain the propagation of emerging diseases that are transmissible from human to human, non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) aimed at reducing the interactions between humans are usually implemented. One example of the latter kind of…
We study the epidemic spreading process following contact dynamics with heavy-tailed waiting time distributions. We show both analytically and numerically that the temporal heterogeneity of contact dynamics can significantly suppress the…
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…
Drug resistance and strong contacts actually play crucial roles in epidemic spread in complex systems. Nevertheless, neither theoretical model or methodology is proposed to address this. We thus consider an edge-based epidemic spread model…
The impact of mitigation or control measures on an epidemics can be estimated by fitting the parameters of a compartmental model to empirical data, and running the model forward with modified parameters that account for a specific measure.…