Related papers: Population-scale testing can suppress the spread o…
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 infections, the standard method is to test each subject individually. If testing methodology is such that samples from multiple subjects can be efficiently combined and tested at once, yielding a positive results if any one…
Testing is a crucial control mechanism for an epidemic outbreak because it enables the health authority to detect and isolate the infected cases, thereby limiting the disease transmission to susceptible people, when no effective treatment…
We consider real-time timely tracking of infection status (e.g., covid-19) of individuals in a population. In this work, a health care provider wants to detect infected people as well as people who recovered from the disease as quickly as…
As infectious disease outbreaks emerge, public health agencies often enact vaccination and social distancing measures to slow transmission. Their success depends on not only strategies and resources, but also public adherence. Individual…
Testing symptomatic individuals for a disease can deliver treatment resources, if tests' results turn positive, which speeds up their treatment and might also decrease individuals' contacts to other ones. An imperfect test, however, might…
We consider real-time timely tracking of infection status (e.g., covid-19) of individuals in a population. In this work, a health care provider wants to detect infected people as well as people who have recovered from the disease as quickly…
Global strategies to contain a pandemic, such as social distancing and protective measures, are designed to reduce the overall transmission rate between individuals. Despite such measures, essential institutions, including hospitals,…
We argue that frequent sampling of the fraction of infected people (either by random testing or by analysis of sewage water), is central to managing the COVID-19 pandemic because it both measures in real time the key variable controlled by…
We consider a model for an epidemic in a population that occupies geographically distinct locations. The disease is spread within subpopulations by contacts between infective and susceptible individuals, and is spread between subpopulations…
When an infectious disease strikes a population, the number of newly reported cases is often the only available information that one can obtain during early stages of the outbreak. An important goal of early outbreak analysis is to obtain a…
Testing is a crucial control mechanism in the beginning phase of an epidemic when the vaccines are not yet available. It enables the public health authority to detect and isolate the infected cases from the population, thereby limiting the…
Early detection of person-to-person transmission of emerging infectious diseases such as avian influenza is crucial for containing pandemics. We developed a simple permutation test and its refined version for this purpose. A simulation…
High impact epidemics constitute one of the largest threats humanity is facing in the 21st century. Testing, contact tracing and quarantining are critical in slowing down epidemic dynamics, but may prove insufficient for highly contagious…
A simple, but ``classical``, stochastic model for epidemic spread in a finite, but large, population is studied. The progress of the epidemic can be divided into three different phases that requires different tools to analyse. Initially the…
The World Health Organisation (WHO) has very strongly recommended testing and isolation as a strategy for controlling the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. The goal of this paper is to quantify the effects of detection and isolation in formal…
Motivated by the increasing number of COVID-19 cases that have been observed in many countries after the vaccination and relaxation of non-pharmaceutical interventions, we propose a mathematical model on time-varying networks for the spread…
In epidemic or pandemic situations, resources for testing the infection status of individuals may be scarce. Although group testing can help to significantly increase testing capabilities, the (repeated) testing of entire populations can…
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 dynamics of contact networks and epidemics of infectious diseases often occur on comparable time scales. Ignoring one of these time scales may provide an incomplete understanding of the population dynamics of the infection process. We…