Related papers: Contact Tracing: Computational Bounds, Limitations…
The spread of COVID-19 caused by the recently discovered SARS-CoV-2 virus has become a worldwide problem with devastating consequences. To slow down the spread of the pandemic, mass quarantines have been implemented globally, provoking…
Major advances in public health have resulted from disease prevention. However, prevention of a new infectious disease by vaccination or pharmaceuticals is made difficult by the slow process of vaccine and drug development. We propose an…
The global outbreak of COVID-19 has led to focus on efforts to manage and mitigate the continued spread of the disease. One of these efforts include the use of contact tracing to identify people who are at-risk of developing the disease…
Background: The global spread of the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) epidemic has clearly shown the importance of considering the long-range transportation networks in the understanding of emerging diseases outbreaks. The…
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…
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…
Containment of epidemic outbreaks entails great societal and economic costs. Cost-effective containment strategies rely on efficiently identifying infected individuals, making the best possible use of the available testing resources.…
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…
We present a general framework for adaptive allocation of viral tests in social contact networks. We pose and solve several complementary problems. First, we consider the design of a social sensing system whose objective is the early…
Contact tracing has existed in various forms for a very long time. With the rise of COVID-19, the concept has become increasingly important to help slow the spread of the virus. One approach to modernizing contact tracing is to introduce…
Imported COVID-19 cases, if unchecked, can jeopardize the effort of domestic containment. We aim to find out what sustainable border control options for different entities (e.g., countries, states) exist during the reopening phases, given…
We investigate the spread of diseases, computer viruses or information on complex networks and also immunization strategies to prevent or control the spread. When an entire population cannot be immunized and the effect of immunization is…
We study the critical effect of an intermittent social distancing strategy on the propagation of epidemics in adaptive complex networks. We characterize the effect of our strategy in the framework of the susceptible-infected-recovered…
Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, technology enthusiasts have pushed for digital contact tracing as a critical tool for breaking the COVID-19 transmission chains. Motivated by this push, many countries and companies have created…
A growing body of literature attempts to learn about contagion using observational (i.e. non-experimental) data collected from a single social network. While the conclusions of these studies may be correct, the methods rely on assumptions…
Many datasets describing contacts in a population suffer from incompleteness due to population sampling and underreporting of contacts. Data-driven simulations of spreading processes using such incomplete data lead to an underestimation of…
In the early stage of an infectious disease outbreak, public health strategies tend to gravitate towards non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) given the time required to develop targeted treatments and vaccines. One of the most common…
How to avoid a second wave of COVID-19 after reopening the economy is a pressing question. The extremely high basic reproductive number $R_0$ (5.7 to 6.4, shown in new studies) of SARS-CoV-2 further complicates the challenge. Here we assess…
In this work we propose the design principles behind the development of a smart application utilized by mobile devices in order to control the spread of SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus disease that caused the COVID-19 pandemic. Through the…
Models for control of epidemics on local, global and small-world networks are considered, with only partial information accessible about the status of individuals and their connections. The main goal of an effective control measure is to…