Related papers: Optimizing testing policies for detecting COVID-19…
In this paper, we provide insights on how much testing and social distancing is required to control COVID-19. To this end, we develop a compartmental model that accounts for key aspects of the disease: 1) incubation time, 2) age-dependent…
In epidemic or pandemic situations, resources for testing the infection status of individuals may be scarce. Although group testing can help to significantly increase testing capabilities, the (repeated) testing of entire populations can…
Efficient personnel scheduling plays a significant role in matching workload demand in organizations. However, staff scheduling is sometimes affected by unexpected events, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, that disrupt regular operations.…
Suppressing SARS-CoV-2 will likely require the rapid identification and isolation of infected individuals, on an ongoing basis. RT-PCR (reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction) tests are accurate but costly, making regular testing…
A number of theoretical models have been developed in recent years modelling epidemic spread in educational settings such as universities to help inform re-opening strategies during the Covid-19 pandemic. However, these studies have had…
Efficient testing and vaccination protocols are critical aspects of epidemic management. To study the optimal allocation of limited testing and vaccination resources in a heterogeneous contact network of interacting susceptible, recovered,…
We present two epidemiological models, which extend the classical SEIR model by accounting for the effect of indiscriminate quarantining, isolation of infected individuals based on testing and the presence of asymptomatic individuals. Given…
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…
Residential colleges and universities face unique challenges in providing in-person instruction during the COVID-19 pandemic. Administrators are currently faced with decisions about whether to open during the pandemic and what modifications…
We propose a mathematical model based on probability theory to optimize COVID-19 testing by a multi-step batch testing approach with variable batch sizes. This model and simulation tool dramatically increase the efficiency and efficacy of…
Motivated by the increasing number of COVID-19 cases that have been observed in many countries after the vaccination and relaxation of non-pharmaceutical interventions, we propose a mathematical model on time-varying networks for the spread…
The 2019 Novel Corona virus infection (COVID 19) is an ongoing public health emergency of international focus. Significant gaps persist in our knowledge of COVID 19 epidemiology, transmission dynamics, investigation tools and management,…
When the novel coronavirus disease SARS-CoV2 (COVID-19) was officially declared a pandemic by the WHO in March 2020, the scientific community had already braced up in the effort of making sense of the fast-growing wealth of data gathered by…
In many public health settings, there is a perceived tension between allocating resources to known vulnerable areas and learning about the overall prevalence of the problem. Inspired by a door-to-door Covid-19 testing program we helped…
The COVID-19 pandemic provides new motivation for a classic problem in epidemiology: estimating the empirical rate of transmission during an outbreak (formally, the time-varying reproduction number) from case counts. While standard methods…
When a new infectious disease (or a new strain of an existing one) emerges, as in the recent COVID-19 pandemic, different types of mobility restrictions are considered to slow down or mitigate the spread of the disease. The measures to be…
We study a dynamic infection spread model, inspired by the discrete time SIR model, where infections are spread via non-isolated infected individuals. While infection keeps spreading over time, a limited capacity testing is performed at…
During the early months of the current COVID-19 pandemic, social-distancing measures effectively slowed disease transmission in many countries in Europe and Asia, but the same benefits have not been observed in some developing countries…
We study how international flights can facilitate the spread of an epidemic to a worldwide scale. We combine an infrastructure network of flight connections with a population density dataset to derive the mobility network, and then we…
The World Health Organisation (WHO) has very strongly recommended testing and isolation as a strategy for controlling the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. The goal of this paper is to quantify the effects of detection and isolation in formal…