Related papers: Contact Tracing: Computational Bounds, Limitations…
Without a cure, vaccine, or proven long-term immunity against SARS-CoV-2, test-trace-and-isolate (TTI) strategies present a promising tool to contain its spread. For any TTI strategy, however, mitigation is challenged by pre- and…
Non-pharmaceutical interventions, such as contact tracing and social distancing, are critical for controlling epidemic outbreaks, yet their dynamic interactions remain underexplored. We introduce a probabilistic framework to analyze the…
Epidemic spreading can be suppressed by the introduction of containment measures such as social distancing and lock downs. Yet, when such measures are relaxed, new epidemic waves and infection cycles may occur. Here we explore this issue in…
A wide range of approaches have been applied to manage the spread of global pandemic events such as COVID-19, which have met with varying degrees of success. Given the large-scale social and economic impact coupled with the increasing time…
This paper is concerned with a stochastic model for the spread of an SEIR (susceptible -> exposed (=latent) -> infective -> removed) epidemic with a contact tracing scheme, in which removed individuals may name some of their infectious…
Smartphone-based electronic contact tracing is currently considered an essential tool towards easing lockdowns, curfews, and shelter-in-place orders issued by most governments around the world in response to the 2020 novel coronavirus…
The rapid worldwide spread of the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) demonstrated the potential threat an infectious disease poses in a closely interconnected and interdependent world. Here we introduce a probabilistic model which…
We study the impact of parameter estimation and state measurement errors on a control framework for optimally mitigating the spread of epidemics. We capture the epidemic spreading process using a susceptible-infected-removed (SIR) epidemic…
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…
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,…
Group testing can save testing resources in the context of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. In group testing, we are given $n$ samples, one per individual, and arrange them into $m < n$ pooled samples, where each pool is obtained by mixing a…
Pandemic and epidemic diseases such as CoVID-19, SARS-CoV2, and Ebola have spread to multiple countries and infected thousands of people. Such diseases spread mainly through person-to-person contacts. Health care authorities recommend…
Large-scale testing is considered key to assess the state of the current COVID-19 pandemic. Yet, the link between the reported case numbers and the true state of the pandemic remains elusive. We develop mathematical models based on…
We consider an age-structured epidemic model with two basic public health interventions: (i) identifying and isolating symptomatic cases, and (ii) tracing and quarantine of the contacts of identified infectives. The dynamics of the infected…
Many countries have passed their first COVID-19 epidemic peak. Traditional epidemiological models describe this as a result of non-pharmaceutical interventions that pushed the growth rate below the recovery rate. In this new phase of the…
The integration of empirical data in computational frameworks to model the spread of infectious diseases poses challenges that are becoming pressing with the increasing availability of high-resolution information on human mobility and…
This paper considers a stochastic SIR (susceptible$\to$infective$\to$removed) epidemic model in which individuals may make infectious contacts in two ways, both within `households' (which for ease of exposition are assumed to have equal…
We study spreading on networks where the contact dynamics between the nodes is governed by a random process and where the inter-contact time distribution may differ from the exponential. We consider a process of imperfect spreading, where…
Contact tracing is an important control strategy for containing Ebola epidemics. From a theoretical perspective, explicitly incorporating contact tracing with disease dynamics presents challenges, and population level effects of contact…
The problem of mapping human close-range proximity networks has been tackled using a variety of technical approaches. Wearable electronic devices, in particular, have proven to be particularly successful in a variety of settings relevant…