Related papers: Heterogeneity and Superspreading Effect on Herd Im…
Recently, [8] has proposed that heterogeneity of infectiousness (and susceptibility) across individuals in infectious diseases, plays a major role in affecting the Herd Immunity Threshold (HIT). Such heterogeneity has been observed in…
The contact structure of a population plays an important role in transmission of infection. Many ``structured models'' capture aspects of the contact structure through an underlying network or a mixing matrix. An important observation in…
When a fraction of a population becomes immune to an infectious disease, the population-wide infection risk decreases nonlinearly due to collective protection, known as herd immunity. Some studies based on mean-field models suggest that…
We study how the herd immunity threshold and the expected epidemic size depend on homophily with respect to vaccine adoption. We find that the presence of homophily considerably increases the critical vaccine coverage needed for herd…
We study the influence of the rate of the attainment of herd immunity (HI), in the absence of an approved vaccine, on the vulnerable population. We essentially ask the question: how hard the evolution towards the desired herd immunity could…
During infectious disease epidemics, pathogen transmission occurs in host populations made up of interacting subpopulations. Using stochastic simulation and analytical approximations, we examine how outbreak sizes in networked populations…
A quantitative COVID-19 model that incorporates hidden asymptomatic patients is developed, and an analytic solution in parametric form is given. The model incorporates the impact of lockdown and resulting spatial migration of population due…
Population heterogeneity, especially in individuals' contact networks, plays an important role in transmission dynamics of infectious diseases. For vaccine-preventable diseases, outstanding issues like vaccine hesitancy and availability of…
Herd immunity is a critical concept in epidemiology, describing a threshold at which a sufficient proportion of a population is immune, either through infection or vaccination, thereby preventing sustained transmission of a pathogen. In the…
Individual contributions to the spread of an epidemic vary widely due to an individual's location in a social network and their intrinsic ability to spread or contract diseases. While the effect of heterogeneous population structure and…
We generalize the Susceptible-Infected-Removed model for epidemics to take into account generic effects of heterogeneity in the degree of susceptibility to infection in the population. We introduce a single new parameter corresponding to a…
We study a SEIR model considered by Gomes et al. \cite{Gomes2020} and Aguas et al. \cite{Aguas2020} where different individuals are assumed to have different levels of susceptibility or exposure to infection. Under this heterogeneity…
In this study we analyze the evolution of the effective reproduction number, $R$, through a SIR spreading process in heterogeneous networks; Characterizing its decay process allows to analytically study the effects of countermeasures on the…
The shape of an epidemic wave in simple epidemic models applies to a homogeneous distribution of infected people in the population. In large inhomogeneous systems, at country-scale for instance, the wave shape is similar except for the…
In this note we estimate herd immunity levels for the Covid-19 epidemic using a standard SEIR system that models the disease dynamics in homogeneous populations. The results obtained are indicative of values between 80% and 90% for…
Epidemics generally spread through a succession of waves that reflect factors on multiple timescales. On short timescales, super-spreading events lead to burstiness and overdispersion, while long-term persistent heterogeneity in…
The basic and effective reproduction numbers are widely used metrics for characterizing the dynamics of infectious disease epidemics. However, the interpretation of these numbers is based on the assumption of homogeneous mixing and may not…
The dynamics of herd immunity depend crucially on the interaction between collective social behavior and disease transmission, but the role of heterogeneity in this context frequently remains unclear. Here, we dissect this co-evolutionary…
Most countries are suffering severely from the ongoing covid-19 pandemic despite various levels of preventive measures. A common question is if and when a country or region will reach herd immunity $h$. The classical herd immunity level…
Infection can spread easily on networks with heterogeneous degree distribution. Here, we considered targeted immunization on such networks, wherein a fraction of individuals with the highest connectivity are immunized. To quantify the…