Related papers: Containing COVID-19 outbreaks using a Firewall

A well-known characteristic of pandemics such as COVID-19 is the high level of transmission heterogeneity in the infection spread: not all infected individuals spread the disease at the same rate and some individuals (superspreaders) are…

COVID-19 has spread from China across Europe and the United States and has become a global pandemic. In countries of the Global South, due to often weaker socioeconomic options and health care systems, effective local countermeasures remain…

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…

Amid the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, public health authorities and the general population are striving to achieve a balance between safety and normalcy. Ever changing conditions call for the development of theory and simulation tools to…

Motivated by the issue of COVID-19 mitigation, in this work we tackle the general problem of optimally controlling an epidemic outbreak of a communicable disease structured by time since exposure, by the aid of two types of control…

Motivated by massive outbreaks of COVID-19 that occurred even in populations with high vaccine uptake, we propose a novel multi-population temporal network model for the spread of recurrent epidemic diseases. We study the effect of human…

The COVID-19 pandemic began over two years ago, yet schools, businesses, and other organizations are still struggling to keep the risk of disease outbreak low while returning to (near) normal functionality. Observations from these past…

While many efforts are currently devoted to vaccines development and administration, social distancing measures, including severe restrictions such as lockdowns, remain fundamental tools to contain the spread of COVID-19. A crucial point…

This paper is concerned with the design of intermittent non-pharmaceutical strategies to mitigate the spread of the COVID-19 epidemic exploiting network epidemiological models. Specifically, by studying a variational equation for the…

In this work, we simulate the COVID-19 pandemic dynamics in a population modeled as a network of groups wherein infection can propagate both via intra-group and via inter-group interactions. Our results emphasize the importance of…

Restrictions on social and economic activities, as well as vaccinations, have been a key intervention in containing the COVID-19 epidemic. Our work focuses on better understanding the options available to policymakers under the conditions…

In this work we propose a novel space-dependent multiscale model for the spread of infectious diseases in a two-dimensional spatial context on realistic geographical scenarios. The model couples a system of kinetic transport equations…

The outbreak and propagation of COVID-19 have posed a considerable challenge to modern society. In particular, the different restrictive actions taken by governments to prevent the spread of the virus have changed the way humans interact…

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…

A configuration model for epidemic spread, based on a scale-free network, is introduced. We obtain the analytical solutions describing both unstable and stable dynamics of the epidemic spreading, and demonstrate how these regimes can…

Group testing was conceived during World War II to identify soldiers infected with syphilis using as few tests as possible, and it has attracted renewed interest during the COVID-19 pandemic. A long-standing assumption in the probabilistic…

Early assessments of the spreading rate of COVID-19 were subject to significant uncertainty, as expected with limited data and difficulties in case ascertainment, but more reliable inferences can now be made. Here, we estimate from European…

Residential aged-care facilities (RACFs, also called long-term care facilities, aged care homes, or nursing homes) have elevated risks of respiratory infection outbreaks and associated disease burden. During the COVID-19 pandemic, social…

Recent re-opening policies in the US, following a period of social distancing measures, introduced a significant increase in daily COVID-19 infections, calling for a roll-back or substantial revisiting of these policies in many states. The…

To mitigate the spread of COVID-19 pandemic, decision-makers and public authorities have announced various non-pharmaceutical policies. Analyzing the causal impact of these policies in reducing the spread of COVID-19 is important for future…