Related papers: Optimal adaptive testing for epidemic control: com…
Epidemic control is of great importance for human society. Adjusting interacting partners is an effective individualized control strategy. Intuitively, it is done either by shortening the interaction time between susceptible and infected…
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…
The spread of COVID-19 has been thwarted in most countries through non-pharmaceutical interventions. In particular, the most effective measures in this direction have been the stay-at-home and closure strategies of businesses and schools.…
In the context of epidemiology, policies for disease control are often devised through a mixture of intuition and brute-force, whereby the set of logically conceivable policies is narrowed down to a small family described by a few…
During the COVID-19 pandemic, case isolation emerged as a key non-pharmaceutical intervention in pandemic response. Its effectiveness hinges on the timing of isolation, which is often dictated by the onset of contagiousness. While…
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…
There are multiple testing methods to ascertain an infection in an individual and they vary in their performances, cost and delay. Unfortunately, better performing tests are sometimes costlier and time consuming and can only be done for a…
Testing individuals for pathogens can affect the spread of epidemics. Understanding how individual-level processes of sampling and reporting test results can affect community- or population-level spread is a dynamical modeling question. The…
When testing for a disease such as COVID-19, the standard method is individual testing: we take a sample from each individual and test these samples separately. An alternative is pooled testing (or "group testing"), where samples are mixed…
The outbreak of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) is unfolding as a major international crisis whose influence extends to every aspect of our daily lives. Effective testing allows infected individuals to be quarantined, thus reducing the…
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.…
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,…
Motivated with various responses of world governments to COVID-19, here we develop a toy model of the dependence epidemics spreading on the availability of tests for disease. Our model, that we call SUDR+K, is based on usual SIR model, but…
Pandemic control measures like lock-down, restrictions on restaurants and gatherings, social-distancing have shown to be effective in curtailing the spread of COVID-19. However, their sustained enforcement has negative economic effects. To…
Accurate detection of infected individuals is one of the critical steps in stopping any pandemic. When the underlying infection rate of the disease is low, testing people in groups, instead of testing each individual in the population, can…
In this study, we present an epidemic-controlled SIRD model with two types of control strategies: mask wear and screening. The aim of this study is to minimize the number of deceased keeping a minimal cost of mask advertising and screening.…
We investigate adaptive strategies to robustly and optimally control the COVID-19 pandemic via social distancing measures based on the example of Germany. Our goal is to minimize the number of fatalities over the course of two years without…
Large-scale testing is crucial in pandemic containment, but resources are often prohibitively constrained. We study the optimal application of pooled testing for populations that are heterogeneous with respect to an individual's infection…
The experience of Singapur and South Korea makes it clear that under certain circumstances massive testing is an effective way for containing the advance of the COVID-19. In this paper, we propose a modified SEIR model which takes into…
We consider a novel method to increase the reliability of COVID-19 virus or antibody tests by using specially designed pooled testings. Instead of testing nasal swab or blood samples from individual persons, we propose to test mixtures of…