Related papers: Whom to Test? Active Sampling Strategies for Manag…

Contact tracing is one of the most important tools for preventing the spread of infectious diseases, but as the experience of COVID-19 showed, it is also next-to-impossible to implement when the disease is spreading rapidly. We show how to…

Aim of this paper is the description of a new tool to support institutions in the implementation of targeted countermeasures, based on quantitative and multi-scale elements, for the fight and prevention of emergencies, such as the current…

Having accurate and timely data on confirmed active COVID-19 cases is challenging, since it depends on testing capacity and the availability of an appropriate infrastructure to perform tests and aggregate their results. In this paper, we…

The changing nature of the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the importance of comprehensively considering its impacts and considering changes over time. Most COVID-19 related research addresses narrowly focused research questions and is…

The spread of an undesirable contact process, such as an infectious disease (e.g. COVID-19), is contained through testing and isolation of infected nodes. The temporal and spatial evolution of the process (along with containment through…

The COVID-19 pandemic has spread rapidly worldwide, overwhelming manual contact tracing in many countries and resulting in widespread lockdowns for emergency containment. Large-scale digital contact tracing (DCT) has emerged as a potential…

One of the more widely advocated solutions for slowing down the spread of COVID-19 has been automated contact tracing. Since proximity data can be collected by personal mobile devices, the natural proposal has been to use this for automated…

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has spread rapidly across the world, leading to enormous amounts of human death and economic loss. Until definitive preventive or curative measures are developed, policies regarding testing,…

Strategic test allocation plays a major role in the control of both emerging and existing pandemics (e.g., COVID-19, HIV). Widespread testing supports effective epidemic control by (1) reducing transmission via identifying cases, and (2)…

The emergence of an epidemic evokes the need to monitor its spread and assess and validate any mitigation measures enacted by governments and administrative bodies in real time. We present here a method to observe and quantify this spread…

We propose a mathematical model based on probability theory to optimize COVID-19 testing by a multi-step batch testing approach with variable batch sizes. This model and simulation tool dramatically increase the efficiency and efficacy of…

COVID-19, a viral respiratory pandemic, has rapidly spread throughout the globe. Large scale and rapid testing of the population is required to contain the disease, but such testing is prohibitive in terms of resources, cost and time.…

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is an ongoing pandemic infectious disease outbreak that has significantly harmed and threatened the health and lives of millions or even billions of people. COVID-19 has also negatively impacted the…

Because of the rapid spread of COVID-19 to almost every part of the globe, huge volumes of data and case studies have been made available, providing researchers with a unique opportunity to find trends and make discoveries like never…

Group testing is an efficient method for testing a large population to detect infected individuals. In this paper, we consider an efficient adaptive two stage group testing scheme. Using a straightforward analysis, we characterize the…

The emergence of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) in the United States has forced federal and local governments to implement containment measures. Moreover, the severity of the situation has sparked engagement by both the research and…

Sample pooling consists in combining samples from multiple individuals into a single pool that is then tested using a unique test-kit. A positive test means that at least one individual within the pool is infected. Here, we propose an…

In many public health settings, there is a perceived tension between allocating resources to known vulnerable areas and learning about the overall prevalence of the problem. Inspired by a door-to-door Covid-19 testing program we helped…

With the outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic, a dire need to effectively identify the individuals who may have come in close-contact to others who have been infected with COVID-19 has risen. This process of identifying individuals, also termed as…

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…