Related papers: The Testing Multiplier: Fear vs Containment
Motivated by epidemics such as COVID-19, we study the spread of a contagious disease when behavior responds to the disease's prevalence. We extend the SIR epidemiological model to include endogenous meeting rates. Individuals benefit from…
Surveillance of diseases in a pandemic is an important part of public health policy. Diagnostic testing at the individual level is often infeasible due to resource constraints. To circumvent these constraints, group testing can be applied.…
The COVID-19 pandemic has plagued the world for months. The U.S. has taken measures to counter it. On a daily basis, newly confirmed cases have been reported. In the early days, these numbers showed an increasing trend. Recently, the…
Interest in targeted disease prevention has stimulated development of models that assign risks to individuals, using their personal covariates. We need to evaluate these models, and to quantify the gains achieved by expanding a model with…
An epidemic carries human and fiscal costs. In the case of imported pandemics, the first-best solution is to restrict national borders to identify and isolate infected individuals. However, when that opportunity is not fully seized and…
A number of theoretical models have been developed in recent years modelling epidemic spread in educational settings such as universities to help inform re-opening strategies during the Covid-19 pandemic. However, these studies have had…
The dynamics of economies and infectious disease are inexorably linked: economic well-being influences health (sanitation, nutrition, treatment capacity, etc.) and health influences economic well-being (labor productivity lost to sickness…
The global crisis of 2008 provoked a heightened interest among scientists to study the phenomenon, its propagation and negative consequences. The process of modelling the spread of a virus is commonly used in epidemiology. Conceptually, the…
In the pool of people seeking partners, a uniformly greater preference for abstinence increases the prevalence of infection and worsens everyone's welfare. In contrast, prevention and treatment reduce prevalence and improve payoffs. The…
We study the effects on economic activity of a pure temporary change in government debt and the relationship between the debt multiplier and the level of debt in an overlapping generations framework. The debt multiplier is positive but…
The process of infection of a host is complex, influenced by factors such as microbial variation within and between hosts as well as differences in dose across hosts. This study uses dose-response and within-host microbial infection models…
As of December 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic has infected over 75 million people, making it the deadliest pandemic in modern history. This study develops a novel compartmental epidemiological model specific to the SARS-CoV-2 virus and…
Recent re-opening policies in the US, following a period of social distancing measures, introduced a significant increase in daily COVID-19 infections, calling for a roll-back or substantial revisiting of these policies in many states. The…
We consider real-time timely tracking of infection status (e.g., covid-19) of individuals in a population. In this work, a health care provider wants to detect infected people as well as people who have recovered from the disease as quickly…
The death toll for Covid-19 may be reduced by dividing the population into two classes, the vulnerable and the fit, with different lockdown regimes. Instead of one reproduction number there now are four parameters. These make it possible to…
Consider a Markovian SIR epidemic model in a homogeneous community. To this model we add a rate at which individuals are tested, and once an infectious individual tests positive it is isolated and each of their contacts are traced and…
Common asset holdings are widely believed to have been the primary vector of contagion in the recent financial crisis. We develop a network approach to the amplification of financial contagion due to the combination of overlapping…
Choice overload - in which larger choice sets are detrimental to a chooser's well-being - is potentially of great importance in the design of economic policy. Yet the current evidence on its prevalence is inconclusive. We argue that…
The impact of mitigation or control measures on an epidemics can be estimated by fitting the parameters of a compartmental model to empirical data, and running the model forward with modified parameters that account for a specific measure.…
Panic may spread over a crowd in a similar fashion as contagious diseases do in social groups. People no exposed to a panic source may express fear, alerting others of imminent danger. This social mechanism initiates an evacuation process,…