Related papers: Optimal policies for mitigating pandemic costs
Public transport is one of the most disrupted sectors of the COVID-19 pandemic with reported ridership drops up to 90% in majorly affected countries. As many government authorities strive to partially resume activities, public transport…
The impact of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic is being felt in all spheres of our lives -- cutting across the boundaries of nation, wealth, religions or race. From the time of the first detection of infection among the public, the virus…
In this study, we present an epidemic-controlled SIRD model with two types of control strategies: mask wear and screening. The aim of this study is to minimize the number of deceased keeping a minimal cost of mask advertising and screening.…
Epidemic control is of great importance for human society. Adjusting interacting partners is an effective individualized control strategy. Intuitively, it is done either by shortening the interaction time between susceptible and infected…
``When in a difficult situation, it is sometimes better to give up and start all over again''. While this empirical truth has been regularly observed in a wide range of circumstances, quantifying the effectiveness of such a heuristic…
Since early 2020, the world has been dealing with a raging pandemic outbreak: COVID-19. A year later, vaccines have become accessible, but in limited quantities, so that governments needed to devise a strategy to decide which part of the…
The implementation of public policies is crucial in controlling the spread of COVID-19. However, the effectiveness of different policies can vary across different aspects of epidemic containment. Identifying the most effective policies is…
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,…
The main focus of this chapter is on public health control strategies which are currently the main way to mitigate COVID-19 pandemic. We introduce and compare compartmental models of increasing complexity for COVID-19 transmission to…
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…
The recent COVID-19 pandemic underscores the significance of early-stage non-pharmacological intervention strategies. The widespread use of masks and the systematic implementation of contact tracing strategies provide a potentially equally…
Epidemiological models can not only be used to forecast the course of a pandemic like COVID-19, but also to propose and design non-pharmaceutical interventions such as school and work closing. In general, the design of optimal policies…
Quarantine measure is a commonly used non-pharmaceutical intervention during the outbreak of infectious diseases. A key problem for implementing quarantine measure is to determine the duration of quarantine. In this paper, a policy with…
Without vaccines and treatments, societies must rely on non-pharmaceutical intervention strategies to control the spread of emerging diseases such as COVID-19. Though complete lockdown is epidemiologically effective, because it eliminates…
In this paper, we introduce a new control-theoretic paradigm for mitigating the spread of a virus. To this end, our discrete-time controller, aims to reduce the number of new daily deaths, and consequently, the cumulative number of deaths.…
We consider an SIS-type epidemic process that evolves on a known graph. We assume that a fixed curing budget can be allocated at each instant to the nodes of the graph, towards the objective of minimizing the expected extinction time of the…
We study first order necessary conditions for an optimal control problem of a Susceptible-Infected-Recovered (SIR) model with limitations on the duration of the quarantine. The control is done by means of the reproduction number, i.e., the…
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…
Pandemics involve the high transmission of a disease that impacts global and local health and economic patterns. The impact of a pandemic can be minimized by enforcing certain restrictions on a community. However, while minimizing infection…
Data-driven risk networks describe many complex system dynamics arising in fields such as epidemiology and ecology. They lack explicit dynamics and have multiple sources of cost, both of which are beyond the current scope of traditional…