Related papers: Lowest-cost virus suppression
Governments across the world are currently facing the task of selecting suitable intervention strategies to cope with the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. This is a highly challenging task, since harsh measures may result in economic…
The optimal allocation of vaccines to population subgroups over time is a challenging health care management problem. In the context of a pandemic, the interaction between vaccination policies adopted by multiple agents and the cooperation…
National and local governments have implemented a large number of policies in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. Evaluating the effects of these policies, both on the number of Covid-19 cases as well as on other economic outcomes is a key…
Mitigation measures are essential for controlling the spread of infectious diseases during pandemics and epidemics, but they impose considerable societal, individual, and economic costs. We developed a general optimization framework to…
Epidemic risk assessment poses inherent challenges, with traditional approaches often failing to balance health outcomes and economic constraints. This paper presents a data-driven decision support tool that models epidemiological dynamics…
The COVID-19 crisis highlighted the importance of non-medical interventions, such as testing and isolation of infected individuals, in the control of epidemics. Here, we show how to minimize testing needs while maintaining the number of…
Non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) are effective measures to contain a pandemic. Yet, such control measures commonly have a negative effect on the economy. Here, we propose a macro-level approach to support resolving this…
We propose a versatile model with a flexible choice of control for an early-pandemic outbreak prevention when vaccine/drug is not yet available. At that stage, control is often limited to non-medical interventions like social distancing and…
The vanishing epidemic threshold for viruses spreading on scale-free networks indicate that traditional methods, aiming to decrease a virus' spreading rate cannot succeed in eradicating an epidemic. We demonstrate that policies that…
In this research paper we modify a classical SIR model to better adapt to the dynamics of COVID-19, that is we propose the heterogeneous SQAIRD model where COVID-19 spreads over a population of economic agents, namely: the elderly, adults…
We introduce a general system of ordinary differential equations that includes some classical and recent models for the epidemic spread in a closed population without vital dynamic in a finite time horizon. The model is vectorial, in the…
In applications of the optimal control theory to problems in medicine and biology, the dependency of the objective functional on the control itself is often a matter of controversy. In this paper, we explore the impact of the dependency…
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…
Frequent emergence of communicable diseases has been a major concern worldwide. Lack of sufficient resources to mitigate the disease-burden makes the situation even more challenging for lower-income countries. Hence, strategy development…
Optimal control of interdependent epidemics spreading over complex networks is a critical issue. We first establish a framework to capture the coupling between two epidemics, and then analyze the system's equilibrium states by categorizing…
Combating an epidemic entails finding a plan that describes when and how to apply different interventions, such as mask-wearing mandates, vaccinations, school or workplace closures. An optimal plan will curb an epidemic with minimal loss of…
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…
We investigate methods to vaccinate contact networks -- i.e. removing nodes in such a way that disease spreading is hindered as much as possible -- with respect to their cost-efficiency. Any real implementation of such protocols would come…
I develop a novel macroeconomic epidemiological agent-based model to study the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic under varying policy scenarios. Agents differ with regard to their profession, family status and age and interact with other…
This paper proposes a feedback design that effectively copes with uncertainties for reliable epidemic monitoring and control. There are several optimization-based methods to estimate the parameters of an epidemic model by utilizing past…