Related papers: Optimal policies for mitigating pandemic costs

National and local governments have implemented a large number of policies in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. Evaluating the effects of these policies, both on the number of Covid-19 cases as well as on other economic outcomes is a key…

Combating an epidemic entails finding a plan that describes when and how to apply different interventions, such as mask-wearing mandates, vaccinations, school or workplace closures. An optimal plan will curb an epidemic with minimal loss of…

We consider a scenario where a system experiences a disruption, and the states (representing health values) of its components continue to reduce over time, unless they are acted upon by a controller. Given this dynamical setting, we…

The optimal allocation of vaccines to population subgroups over time is a challenging health care management problem. In the context of a pandemic, the interaction between vaccination policies adopted by multiple agents and the cooperation…

We propose an epidemiological model that includes the mobility patterns of the individuals, in the spirit to those considered in (Barmak, 2011, 2016) and (Medus, 2011). We assume that people move around in a city of 120x120 blocks with 300…

Effective epidemic control is crucial for mitigating the spread of infectious diseases, particularly when pharmaceutical interventions such as vaccines or treatments are limited. Non-pharmaceutical strategies, including mobility…

Various non pharmaceutical interventions have been settled to minimise the burden of the COVID-19 outbreak. We build a framework to analyse the dynamics of non pharmaceutical interventions, to distinguish between mitigations measures…

There are multiple testing methods to ascertain an infection in an individual and they vary in their performances, cost and delay. Unfortunately, better performing tests are sometimes costlier and time consuming and can only be done for a…

The problem of controlling multi-agent systems under different models of information sharing among agents has received significant attention in the recent literature. In this paper, we consider a setup where rather than committing to a…

After the introduction of drastic containment measures aimed at stopping the epidemic contagion from SARS-CoV2, many governments have adopted a strategy based on a periodic relaxation of such measures in the face of a severe economic crisis…

The COVID-19 crisis highlighted the importance of non-medical interventions, such as testing and isolation of infected individuals, in the control of epidemics. Here, we show how to minimize testing needs while maintaining the number of…

An epidemic carries human and fiscal costs. In the case of imported pandemics, the first-best solution is to restrict national borders to identify and isolate infected individuals. However, when that opportunity is not fully seized and…

The COVID-19 pandemic has plagued the world for months. The U.S. has taken measures to counter it. On a daily basis, newly confirmed cases have been reported. In the early days, these numbers showed an increasing trend. Recently, the…

The potential tradeoff between health outcomes and economic impact has been a major challenge in the policy making process during the COVID-19 pandemic. Epidemic-economic models designed to address this issue are either too aggregate to…

In light of the COVID-19 pandemic, it is an open challenge and critical practical problem to find a optimal way to dynamically prescribe the best policies that balance both the governmental resources and epidemic control in different…

We evaluate the efficiency of various heuristic strategies for allocating vaccines against COVID-19 and compare them to strategies found using optimal control theory. Our approach is based on a mathematical model which tracks the spread of…

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…

We model information dissemination as a susceptible-infected epidemic process and formulate a problem to jointly optimize seeds for the epidemic and time varying resource allocation over the period of a fixed duration campaign running on a…

The current COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent lockdowns have highlighted the close and delicate relationship between a country's public health and economic health. Macroeconomic models that use preexisting epidemic models to calculate the…

In addition to its public health crisis, COVID-19 pandemic has led to the shutdown and closure of workplaces with an estimated total cost of more than $16 trillion. Given the long hours an average person spends in buildings and indoor…