Related papers: Simple control for complex pandemics
The novel COVID-19 pandemic is a current, major global health threat. Up till now, there is no fully approved pharmacological treatment or a vaccine. In this study, simple mathematical models were employed to examine the dynamics of…
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…
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…
The World Health Organization (WHO) made the assessment that COVID-19 can be characterized as a pandemic on March 11, 2020. To the COVID-19 outbreak, there is no vaccination and no treatment. The only way to control the COVID-19 outbreak is…
Restrictions on social and economic activities, as well as vaccinations, have been a key intervention in containing the COVID-19 epidemic. Our work focuses on better understanding the options available to policymakers under the conditions…
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…
Given multiple new COVID-19 variants are continuously emerging, non-pharmaceutical interventions are still primary control strategies to curb the further spread of coronavirus. However, implementing strict interventions over extended…
The control of the COVID-19 pandemic requires a considerable reduction of contacts mostly achieved by imposing movement control up to the level of enforced quarantine. This has lead to a collapse of substantial parts of the economy.…
Residential colleges and universities face unique challenges in providing in-person instruction during the COVID-19 pandemic. Administrators are currently faced with decisions about whether to open during the pandemic and what modifications…
The COVID-19 pandemic has influenced virtually all aspects of our lives. Across the world, countries have applied various mitigation strategies for the epidemic, based on social, political, and technological instruments. We postulate that…
In December 2019, the first patients in Wuhan, China were diagnosed with a primary atypical pneumonia, which showed to be unknown and contagious. Since then, known as COVID-19 disease, the responsible viral pathogen, SARS-CoV-2, has spread…
The COVID-19 pandemic has led to significant changes in how people are currently living their lives. To determine how to best reduce the effects of the pandemic and start reopening societies, governments have drawn insights from…
Modeling infection spread during pandemics is not new, with models using past data to tune simulation parameters for predictions. These help understand the healthcare burden posed by a pandemic and respond accordingly. However, the problem…
The COVID-19 pandemic has posed a policy making crisis where efforts to slow down or end the pandemic conflict with economic priorities. This paper provides mathematical analysis of optimal disease control policies with idealized…
We develop an agent-based model on a network meant to capture features unique to COVID-19 spread through a small residential college. We find that a safe reopening requires strong policy from administrators combined with cautious behavior…
The COVID-19 pandemic has influenced virtually all aspects of our lives. Across the world, countries have applied various mitigation strategies, based on social, political, and technological instruments. We postulate that multi-agent…
There is a continuing debate on relative benefits of various mitigation and suppression strategies aimed to control the spread of COVID-19. Here we report the results of agent-based modelling using a fine-grained computational simulation of…
Over a year after the start of the COVID-19 epidemics, we are still facing the virus and it is hard to correctly predict its future spread over weeks to come, as well as the impacts of potential political interventions. Current epidemic…
The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic is challenging every part of society. From a scientific point of view the first major task is to predict the dynamics of the pandemic, allowing governments to allocate proper resources and measures to fight it,…
Understanding how to effectively control an epidemic spreading on a network is a problem of paramount importance for the scientific community. The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the need for policies that mitigate the spread,…