Related papers: Optimal policies for mitigating pandemic costs
The COVID-19 pandemic has posed a policy making crisis where efforts to slow down or end the pandemic conflict with economic priorities. This paper provides mathematical analysis of optimal disease control policies with idealized…
This article considers the minimization of the total number of infected individuals over the course of an epidemic in which the rate of infectious contacts can be reduced by time-dependent nonpharmaceutical interventions. The societal and…
The spread of COVID-19 has been thwarted in most countries through non-pharmaceutical interventions. In particular, the most effective measures in this direction have been the stay-at-home and closure strategies of businesses and schools.…
As a common strategy of contagious disease containment, lockdowns will inevitably weaken the economy. The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic underscores the trade-off arising from public health and economic cost. An optimal lockdown policy to…
We formulate an optimal control problem to determine the lockdown policy to curb an epidemic where other control measures are not available yet. We present a unified framework to model the epidemic and economy that allows us to study the…
In this research paper we modify a classical SIR model to better adapt to the dynamics of COVID-19, that is we propose the heterogeneous SQAIRD model where COVID-19 spreads over a population of economic agents, namely: the elderly, adults…
Understanding how to effectively control an epidemic spreading on a network is a problem of paramount importance for the scientific community. The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the need for policies that mitigate the spread,…
In this study, we present a new epidemiological model, with contamination from confirmed and unreported. We also compute equilibria and study their stability without intervention strategies. Optimal control theory has proven to be a…
In the absence of drugs and vaccines, policymakers use non-pharmaceutical interventions such as social distancing to decrease rates of disease-causing contact, with the aim of reducing or delaying the epidemic peak. These measures carry…
Governments across the world are currently facing the task of selecting suitable intervention strategies to cope with the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. This is a highly challenging task, since harsh measures may result in economic…
Optimizing the impact on the economy of control strategies aiming at containing the spread of COVID-19 is a critical challenge. We use daily new case counts of COVID-19 patients reported by local health administrations from different…
We investigate adaptive strategies to robustly and optimally control the COVID-19 pandemic via social distancing measures based on the example of Germany. Our goal is to minimize the number of fatalities over the course of two years without…
This work introduces a novel epidemiological model that simultaneously considers multiple viral strains, reinfections due to waning immunity response over time and an optimal control formulation. This enables us to derive optimal mitigation…
When effective medical treatment and vaccination are not available, non-pharmaceutical interventions such as social distancing, home quarantine and far-reaching shutdown of public life are the only available strategies to prevent the spread…
The recent COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the need of non-pharmaceutical interventions in the first stages of a pandemic. Among these, lockdown policies proved unavoidable yet extremely costly from an economic perspective. To better…
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…
Frequent emergence of communicable diseases has been a major concern worldwide. Lack of sufficient resources to mitigate the disease-burden makes the situation even more challenging for lower-income countries. Hence, strategy development…
During a pandemic, there are conflicting demands arising from public health and economic cost. Lockdowns are a common way of containing infections, but they adversely affect the economy. We study the question of how to minimise the economic…
We consider here an extended SIR model, including several features of the recent COVID-19 outbreak: in particular the infected and recovered individuals can either be detected (+) or undetected (-) and we also integrate an intensive care…
We study the problem of a policymaker who aims at taming the spread of an epidemic while minimizing its associated social costs. The main feature of our model lies in the fact that the disease's transmission rate is a diffusive stochastic…