Related papers: Low case numbers enable long-term stable pandemic …
During a pandemic, there are conflicting demands arising from public health and economic cost. Lockdowns are a common way of containing infections, but they adversely affect the economy. We study the question of how to minimise the economic…
The spread of COVID-19 has been thwarted in most countries through non-pharmaceutical interventions. In particular, the most effective measures in this direction have been the stay-at-home and closure strategies of businesses and schools.…
We argue that frequent sampling of the fraction of infected people (either by random testing or by analysis of sewage water), is central to managing the COVID-19 pandemic because it both measures in real time the key variable controlled by…
In this work we study the stability properties of the equilibrium points of deterministic epidemic models with nonconstant population size. Models with nonconstant population have been studied in the past only in particular cases, two of…
Optimal strategies for epidemic containment are focused on dismantling the contact network through effective immunization with minimal costs. However, network fragmentation is seldom accessible in practice and may present extreme side…
We analyze an optimal control version of a simple SIRS epidemiology model. The policy maker can adopt policies to diminish the contact rate between infected and susceptible individuals, at a specific economic cost. The arrival of a vaccine…
This work introduces a novel epidemiological model that simultaneously considers multiple viral strains, reinfections due to waning immunity response over time and an optimal control formulation. This enables us to derive optimal mitigation…
When an unprecedented infectious disease with high mortality and transmissibility emerges, immediate usage of vaccines or medicines is hardly available. Thus, many health authorities rely on non-pharmaceutical interventions through…
Epidemic spreading can be suppressed by the introduction of containment measures such as social distancing and lock downs. Yet, when such measures are relaxed, new epidemic waves and infection cycles may occur. Here we explore this issue in…
In the context of the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, several reports and studies have attempted to model and predict the spread of the disease. There is also intense debate about policies for limiting the damage, both to health and to the…
We consider the problem of controlling an SIR-model epidemic by temporarily reducing the rate of contact within a population. The control takes the form of a multiplicative reduction in the contact rate of infectious individuals. The…
When effective medical treatment and vaccination are not available, non-pharmaceutical interventions such as social distancing, home quarantine and far-reaching shutdown of public life are the only available strategies to prevent the spread…
What is the long term dynamics of the Covid-19 pandemic? How will it end? Here we constructed an infectious disease model with testing and analyzed the existence and stability of its endemic states. For a large parameter set, including…
We formulate an optimal control problem to determine the lockdown policy to curb an epidemic where other control measures are not available yet. We present a unified framework to model the epidemic and economy that allows us to study the…
We introduce a new coordination problem in distributed computing that we call the population stability problem. A system of agents each with limited memory and communication, as well as the ability to replicate and self-destruct, is…
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…
We consider an epidemiological SIR model with an infection rate depending on the recovered population. We establish sufficient conditions for existence, uniqueness, and stability (local and global) of endemic equilibria and consider also…
Efficient testing and vaccination protocols are critical aspects of epidemic management. To study the optimal allocation of limited testing and vaccination resources in a heterogeneous contact network of interacting susceptible, recovered,…
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…
Epidemic control is of great importance for human society. Adjusting interacting partners is an effective individualized control strategy. Intuitively, it is done either by shortening the interaction time between susceptible and infected…