Related papers: Optimal Control in Pandemics
Epidemics of infectious diseases posing a serious risk to human health have occurred throughout history. During recent epidemics there has been much debate about policy, including how and when to impose restrictions on behaviour.…
We analyse 'stop-and-go' containment policies that produce infection cycles as periods of tight lockdowns are followed by periods of falling infection rates. The subsequent relaxation of containment measures allows cases to increase again…
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…
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…
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,…
As the world fights to contain and control the spread of the Novel Coronavirus, countries are imposing severe measures from restrictions on travel and social gatherings to complete lockdowns. Lockdowns, though effective in controlling the…
The outbreak of COVID-19 has highlighted the intricate interplay between public health and economic stability on a global scale. This study proposes a novel reinforcement learning framework designed to optimize health and economic outcomes…
After the first lockdown in response to the COVID-19 outbreak, many countries faced difficulties in balancing infection control with economics. Due to limited prior knowledge, economists began researching this issue using cost-benefit…
Analysis of policies for managing epidemics require simultaneously an economic and epidemiological perspective. We adopt a cost-of-policy framework to model both the virus spread and the cost of handling the pandemic. Because it is harder…
This paper investigates a behavioral-feedback SIR model in which the infection rate adapts dynamically based on the fractions of susceptible and infected individuals. We introduce an invariant of motion and we characterize the peak of…
In the context of epidemiology, policies for disease control are often devised through a mixture of intuition and brute-force, whereby the set of logically conceivable policies is narrowed down to a small family described by a few…
This paper analyses the optimal control of infectious disease propagation using a classic susceptible-infected-recovered (SIR) model characterised by permanent immunity and the absence of available vaccines. The control is performed over a…
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…
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…
The non-population conserving SIR (SIR-NC) model to describe the spread of infections in a community is proposed and studied. Unlike the standard SIR model, SIR-NC does not assume population conservation. Although similar in form to the…
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 study the impact of parameter estimation and state measurement errors on a control framework for optimally mitigating the spread of epidemics. We capture the epidemic spreading process using a susceptible-infected-removed (SIR) epidemic…
This paper considers a simple model where a social planner can influence the spread-intensity of an infection wave, and, consequently, also the economic activity and population health, through a single parameter. Population health is…
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…
A pandemic is the spread of a disease across large regions, and can have devastating costs to the society in terms of health, economic and social. As such, the study of effective pandemic mitigation strategies can yield significant positive…