Related papers: The Testing Multiplier: Fear vs Containment
To contain the propagation of emerging diseases that are transmissible from human to human, non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) aimed at reducing the interactions between humans are usually implemented. One example of the latter kind of…
The statistical tests that are commonly used for detecting mean or median treatment effects suffer from low power when the two distribution functions differ only in the upper (or lower) tail, as in the assessment of the Total Sharp Score…
The frequent emergence of diseases with the potential to become threats at local and global scales, such as influenza A(H1N1), SARS, MERS, and recently COVID-19 disease, makes it crucial to keep designing models of disease propagation and…
During the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, polymerase chain reaction (PCR) and lateral flow device (LFD) tests were frequently deployed to detect the presence of SARS-CoV-2. Many of these tests were singleplex, and only tested for the presence of a…
Social distancing is the primary policy prescription for combating the COVID-19 pandemic, and has been widely adopted in Europe and North America. We estimate the value of disease avoidance using an epidemiological model that projects the…
We use a stochastic metapopulation model to study the combined effects of seasonality and spatial heterogeneity on disease persistence. We find a pronounced effect of enhanced persistence associated with strong heterogeneity, intermediate…
The outbreak of COVID-19 has highlighted the intricate interplay between public health and economic stability on a global scale. This study proposes a novel reinforcement learning framework designed to optimize health and economic outcomes…
The detection and management of diseases become quite complicated when pathogens contain asymptomatic phenotypes amongst their ranks, as evident during the recent COVID-19 pandemic. Spreading of diseases has been studied extensively under…
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…
Repeated asymptomatic screening for SARS-CoV-2 promises to control spread of the virus but would require too many resources to implement at scale. Group testing is promising for screening more people with fewer test resources: multiple…
Systemic risk is the risk that a company- or industry-level risk could trigger a huge collapse of another or even the whole institution. Various systemic risk measures have been proposed in the literature to quantify the domino and…
The purpose of this study is to investigate the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on economic policy uncertainty in the US and the UK. The impact of the increase in COVID-19 cases and deaths in the country, and the increase in the number of…
We study the associations between everyday economic decision-making quality and people's emotional states. Using high-frequency, highly disaggregated consumer "scanner" data, we show that the cost of poor decision-making is substantial, on…
Considerable interest has recently been focused on studying multiple phenotypes simultaneously in both epidemiological and genomic studies, either to capture the multidimensionality of complex disorders or to understand shared etiology of…
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 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 recovered from the disease as quickly as…
Recent trends in test-time scaling for reasoning models (e.g., OpenAI o1, DeepSeek R1) have led to a popular belief that extending thinking traces using prompts like "Wait" or "Let me rethink" can improve performance. This raises a natural…
The generation interval is the time between the infection time of an infected person and the infection time of his or her infector. Probability density functions for generation intervals have been an important input for epidemic models and…
The spread of COVID-19 and ensuing containment measures have accentuated the profound interdependence among nations or regions. This has been particularly evident in tourism, one of the sectors most affected by uncoordinated mobility…
In this paper we put forward the viewpoint that the notion of stress testing financial institutions and engineered systems can also be made viable appropos the stress testing an individual's strength of conviction in a probability…