Related papers: Low case numbers enable long-term stable pandemic …
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 paper studies if and to which extent COVID-19 epidemics can be controlled by authorities taking decisions on public health measures on the basis of daily reports of swab test results, active cases and total cases. A suitably simplified…
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…
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…
How to prevent the spread of human diseases is a great challenge for the scientific community and so far there are many studies in which immunization strategies have been developed. However, these kind of strategies usually do not consider…
Absent a drug or vaccine, containing epidemic outbreaks is achieved by means of social distancing, specifically mobility restrictions and lock-downs. Such measures impose a hurtful toll on the economy, and are difficult to sustain for…
High impact epidemics constitute one of the largest threats humanity is facing in the 21st century. Testing, contact tracing and quarantining are critical in slowing down epidemic dynamics, but may prove insufficient for highly contagious…
A critical question in epidemic control concerns the minimal requirements for a vaccination campaign to effectively halt a contagion process. However, control measures can inadvertently trigger resurgence dynamics, driven by a reservoir of…
To mitigate the impact of the pandemic, several measures include lockdowns, rapid vaccination programs, school closures, and economic stimulus. These interventions can have positive or unintended negative consequences. Current research 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…
COVID-19 abatement strategies have risks and uncertainties which could lead to repeating waves of infection. We show -- as proof of concept grounded on rigorous mathematical evidence -- that periodic, high-frequency alternation of into, and…
This paper repurposes the classic insight from network theory that long-distance connections drive disease propagation into a strategy for controlling a second wave of Covid-19. We simulate a scenario in which a lockdown is first imposed on…
One of the critical measures to control infectious diseases is a lockdown. Once past the lockdown stage in many parts of the world, the crucial question now concerns the effects of relaxing the lockdown and finding the best ways to…
This study examines the behavior of solutions in a multi-patch epidemic model that includes a saturation incidence mechanism. When the fatality rate due to the disease is not null, our findings show that the solutions of the model tend to…
We consider here an extended SIR model, including several features of the recent COVID-19 outbreak: in particular the infected and recovered individuals can either be detected (+) or undetected (-) and we also integrate an intensive care…
An epidemic model with distributed time delay is derived to describe the dynamics of infectious diseases with varying immunity. It is shown that solutions are always positive, and the model has at most two steady states: disease-free and…
Global strategies to contain a pandemic, such as social distancing and protective measures, are designed to reduce the overall transmission rate between individuals. Despite such measures, essential institutions, including hospitals,…
We study equilibrium distancing during epidemics. Distancing reduces the individual's probability of getting infected but comes at a cost. It creates a single-peaked epidemic, flattens the curve and decreases the size of the epidemic. We…
``When in a difficult situation, it is sometimes better to give up and start all over again''. While this empirical truth has been regularly observed in a wide range of circumstances, quantifying the effectiveness of such a heuristic…
Motivated by the increasing number of COVID-19 cases that have been observed in many countries after the vaccination and relaxation of non-pharmaceutical interventions, we propose a mathematical model on time-varying networks for the spread…