Related papers: Virus spread versus contact tracing: two competing…
Digital contact tracing/notification was initially hailed as a promising strategy to combat SARS-CoV-2, but in most jurisdictions it did not live up to its promise. To avert a given transmission event, both parties must have adopted the…
We estimate the reduction in transmission of SARS-CoV-2 achievable by surveillance testing of a susceptible population at different frequencies, comparing the cases of both the original Wuhan strain and the Delta variant. We estimate the…
Contact tracing has emerged as one of the main mitigation strategies to prevent the spread of pandemics such as COVID-19. Recently, several efforts have been initiated to track individuals, their movements, and interactions using…
Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, technology enthusiasts have pushed for digital contact tracing as a critical tool for breaking the COVID-19 transmission chains. Motivated by this push, many countries and companies have created…
The expected number of secondary infections arising from each index case, referred to as the reproduction or $R$ number, is a vital summary statistic for understanding and managing epidemic diseases. There are many methods for estimating…
Compartmental models are the most widely used framework for modeling infectious diseases. These models have been continuously refined to incorporate all the realistic mechanisms that can shape the course of an epidemic outbreak. Building on…
We propose an epidemic model for the spread of vector-borne diseases. The model, which is built extending the classical susceptible-infected-susceptible model, accounts for two populations -- humans and vectors -- and for cross-contagion…
The scope of this work is to serve as a guiding tool against subjective estimations on real pandemic situations (mainly due to the inability to acquire objective real data over whole populations). The previously introduced model of closed…
The COVID-19 pandemic is the most significant global crisis since World War II that affected almost all the countries of our planet. To control the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak, it is necessary to understand how the virus is transmitted to a…
A simple, but ``classical``, stochastic model for epidemic spread in a finite, but large, population is studied. The progress of the epidemic can be divided into three different phases that requires different tools to analyse. Initially the…
With the COVID-19 pandemic, quarantines took place across the globe. In the aim of stopping or slowing the progression of the COVID-19 contamination, many countries have deployed a contact tracing system to notify persons that be in contact…
We outline a contact-tracing strategy based on proximity sensing using mobile devices. We discuss what an ideal system should look like and what it can do. We show that, when adopted sufficiently broadly, such a contact-tracing strategy can…
Competition and collaboration are at the heart of multi-agent probabilistic spreading processes. The battle on public opinion and competitive marketing campaigns are typical examples of the former, while the joint spread of multiple…
Epidemiological simulations as a method are used to better understand and predict the spreading of infectious diseases, for example of COVID-19. This paper presents an approach that combines person-centric data-driven human mobility…
Most models of epidemic spread, including many designed specifically for COVID-19, implicitly assume mass-action contact patterns and undirected contact networks, meaning that the individuals most likely to spread the disease are also the…
This paper presents methods to choose individuals to test for infection during a pandemic such as COVID-19, characterized by high contagion and presence of asymptomatic carriers. The smart-testing ideas presented here are motivated by…
The experience of Singapur and South Korea makes it clear that under certain circumstances massive testing is an effective way for containing the advance of the COVID-19. In this paper, we propose a modified SEIR model which takes into…
Contact tracing is of paramount importance when it comes to preventing the spreading of infectious diseases. Contact tracing is usually performed manually by authorized personnel. Manual contact tracing is an inefficient, error-prone,…
The Covid-19 pandemic is ongoing worldwide, and the damage it has caused is unprecedented. For prevention, South Korea has adopted a local quarantine strategy rather than a global lockdown. This approach not only minimizes economic damage,…
This work provides an overview on deterministic and stochastic models that have previously been proposed by us to study the transmission dynamics of the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) in Europe and USA. Briefly, we describe realistic…