Related papers: Optimizing testing policies for detecting COVID-19…
Understanding the dynamics of an epidemic spread is crucial for effective control measures. During the COVID-19 pandemic, quarantines were implemented to minimize infections while mitigating social and economic impacts, raising the question…
The outbreak of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) is unfolding as a major international crisis whose influence extends to every aspect of our daily lives. Effective testing allows infected individuals to be quarantined, thus reducing the…
As humanity struggles to contain the global Covid-19 infection, prophylactic actions are grandly slowed down by the shortage of testing kits. Governments have taken several measures to work around this shortage: the FDA has become more…
We study the effectiveness of tracking and testing in mitigating or suppressing epidemic outbreaks, in combination with or as an alternative to quarantines and global lockdowns. We study these intervention methods on a network-based SEIR…
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…
An important component of every country's COVID-19 response is fast and efficient testing - to identify and isolate cases, as well as for early detection of local hotspots. For many countries, producing a sufficient number of tests has been…
Testing individuals for pathogens can affect the spread of epidemics. Understanding how individual-level processes of sampling and reporting test results can affect community- or population-level spread is a dynamical modeling question. The…
In pandemics or epidemics, public health authorities need to rapidly test a large number of individuals, both to determine the line of treatment as well as to know the spread of infection to plan containment, mitigation and future…
To better predict the dynamics of epidemics such as COVID-19, it is important not only to investigate the network of local and long-range contagious contacts but also to understand the temporal dynamics of infectiousness and detectable…
COVID-19, a viral respiratory pandemic, has rapidly spread throughout the globe. Large scale and rapid testing of the population is required to contain the disease, but such testing is prohibitive in terms of resources, cost and time.…
Large-scale testing is considered key to assess the state of the current COVID-19 pandemic. Yet, the link between the reported case numbers and the true state of the pandemic remains elusive. We develop mathematical models based on…
Susceptible-Exposed-Infectious-Recovered (SEIR) models with inter-individual variation in susceptibility or exposure to infection were proposed early in the COVID-19 pandemic as a potential element of the mathematical/statistical toolset…
I study the economic effects of testing during the outbreak of a novel disease. I propose a model where testing permits isolation of the infected and provides agents with information about the prevalence and lethality of the disease.…
We study the impact of model parameter uncertainty on optimally mitigating the spread of epidemics. We capture the epidemic spreading process using a susceptible-infected-removed (SIR) epidemic model and consider testing for isolation as…
The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has spread rapidly across the world, leading to enormous amounts of human death and economic loss. Until definitive preventive or curative measures are developed, policies regarding testing,…
The spread of an undesirable contact process, such as an infectious disease (e.g. COVID-19), is contained through testing and isolation of infected nodes. The temporal and spatial evolution of the process (along with containment through…
In a prior study, a novel deterministic compartmental model known as the SEIHRK model was introduced, shedding light on the pivotal role of test kits as an intervention strategy for mitigating epidemics. Particularly in heterogeneous…
This paper is based on the observation that, during Covid-19 epidemic, the choice of which individuals should be tested has an important impact on the effectiveness of selective confinement measures. This decision problem is closely related…
We propose a simple SIR model in order to investigate the impact of various confinement strategies on a most virulent epidemic. Our approach is motivated by the current COVID-19 pandemic. The main hypothesis is the existence of two…
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…