Related papers: Population-scale testing can suppress the spread o…

Under limited available resources, strategies for mitigating the propagation of an epidemic such as random testing and contact tracing become inefficient. Here, we propose to accurately allocate the resources by computing over time an…

We study the problem of a policymaker who aims at taming the spread of an epidemic while minimizing its associated social costs. The main feature of our model lies in the fact that the disease's transmission rate is a diffusive stochastic…

Traditional disease transmission models assume that the infectious period is exponentially distributed with a recovery rate fixed in time and across individuals. This assumption provides analytical and computational advantages, however it…

First Few X (FFX) studies collect household-stratified data in the early stages of a pandemic, in order to infer severity and transmissibility of an emerging disease. We present a Bayesian method to approximately infer population-level…

Traditional biomedical approaches treat diseases in isolation, but the importance of synergistic disease interactions is now recognized. As a first step we present and analyze a simple coinfection model for two diseases affecting…

We study equilibrium distancing during epidemics. Distancing reduces the individual's probability of getting infected but comes at a cost. It creates a single-peaked epidemic, flattens the curve and decreases the size of the epidemic. We…

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…

During an epidemic control, the containment of the disease is usually achieved through increasing devoted resource to shorten the duration of infectiousness. However, the impact of this resource expenditure has not been studied…

The COVID-19 pandemic poses challenges for continuing economic activity while reducing health risks. While these challenges can be mitigated through testing, testing budget is often limited. Here we study how institutions, such as nursing…

In the group testing problem we aim to identify a small number of infected individuals within a large population. We avail ourselves to a procedure that can test a group of multiple individuals, with the test result coming out positive iff…

We show that the basic reproduction number of an SIS patch model with standard incidence is either strictly decreasing and strictly convex with respect to the diffusion coefficient of infected subpopulation if the patch reproduction numbers…

The ability to directly record human face-to-face interactions increasingly enables the development of detailed data-driven models for the spread of directly transmitted infectious diseases at the scale of individuals. Complete coverage of…

Contact tracing has been extensively studied from different perspectives in recent years. However, there is no clear indication of why this intervention has proven effective in some epidemics (SARS) and mostly ineffective in some others…

In the absence of drugs and vaccines, policymakers use non-pharmaceutical interventions such as social distancing to decrease rates of disease-causing contact, with the aim of reducing or delaying the epidemic peak. These measures carry…

This is a pedagogical paper on estimating the number of people that can be infected by one infectious person during an epidemic outbreak, known as the reproduction number. Knowing the number is crucial for developing policy responses. There…

When controlling an emerging outbreak of an infectious disease it is essential to know the key epidemiological parameters, such as the basic reproduction number $R_0$ and the control effort required to prevent a large outbreak. These…

Infectious diseases occur when pathogens from other individuals or animals infect a person, resulting in harm to both individuals and society as a whole. The outbreak of such diseases can pose a significant threat to human health. However,…

In many cases, tainted information in a computer network can spread in a way similar to an epidemics in the human world. On the other had, information processing paths are often redundant, so a single infection occurrence can be easily…

Epidemiological models describe the spread of an infectious disease within a population. They capture microscopic details on how the disease is passed on among individuals in various different ways, while making predictions about the state…

The recent COVID-19 pandemic has shown that when the reproduction number is high and there are no proper measurements in place, the number of infected people can increase dramatically in a short time, producing a phenomenon that many…