Related papers: Population-scale testing can suppress the spread o…
To better predict the dynamics of epidemics such as COVID-19, it is important not only to investigate the network of local and long-range contagious contacts but also to understand the temporal dynamics of infectiousness and detectable…
The detection and management of diseases become quite complicated when pathogens contain asymptomatic phenotypes amongst their ranks, as evident during the recent COVID-19 pandemic. Spreading of diseases has been studied extensively under…
Epidemic surveillance is a challenging task, especially when crucial data is fragmented across institutions and data custodians are unable or unwilling to share it. This study aims to explore the feasibility of a simple federated…
Epidemiologic screening programs often make use of tests with small, but non-zero probabilities of misdiagnosis. In this article, we assume the target population is finite with a fixed number of true cases, and that we apply an imperfect…
The population-wise error rate (PWER) is a type I error rate for clinical trials with multiple target populations. In such trials, a treatment is tested for its efficacy in each population. The PWER is defined as the probability that a…
Network--based epidemic models that account for heterogeneous contact patterns are extensively used to predict and control the diffusion of infectious diseases. We use census and survey data to reconstruct a geo--referenced and…
We propose a tractable epidemic model that includes containment measures. In the absence of containment measures, the epidemics spread exponentially fast whenever the infectivity rate is positive, $\lambda>0$. The containment measures are…
The time-dependent reproduction number Rt can be used to track pathogen transmission and to assess the efficacy of interventions. This quantity can be estimated by fitting renewal equation models to time series of infectious disease case…
This paper studies the sample complexity of searching over multiple populations. We consider a large number of populations, each corresponding to either distribution P0 or P1. The goal of the search problem studied here is to find one…
Networks of person-person contacts form the substrate along which infectious diseases spread. Most network-based studies of the spread focus on the impact of variations in degree (the number of contacts an individual has). However, other…
Fast testing can help mitigate the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. Despite their accuracy for single sample analysis, infectious diseases diagnostic tools, like RT-PCR, require substantial resources to test large populations.…
The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has spread rapidly across the world, leading to enormous amounts of human death and economic loss. Until definitive preventive or curative measures are developed, policies regarding testing,…
Epidemic control frequently relies on adjusting interventions based on prevalence. But designing such policies is a highly non-trivial problem due to uncertain intervention effects, costs and the difficulty of quantifying key transmission…
Randomized trials of infectious disease interventions, such as vaccines, often focus on groups of connected or potentially interacting individuals. When the pathogen of interest is transmissible between study subjects, interference may…
The abrupt outbreak and transmission of biological diseases has always been a long-time concern of humankind. For long, mathematical modeling has served as a simple and yet efficient tool to investigate, predict, and control spread of…
Epidemiological dynamics are affected by the spatial and demographic structure of the host population. Households and neighbourhoods are known to be important groupings but little is known about the epidemiological interplay between them.…
Large scale disease screening is a complicated process in which high costs must be balanced against pressing public health needs. When the goal is screening for infectious disease, one approach is group testing in which samples are…
In this paper, we propose algorithms that leverage a known community structure to make group testing more efficient. We consider a population organized in disjoint communities: each individual participates in a community, and its infection…
The effective reproduction number is an important descriptor of an infectious disease epidemic. In small populations, ideally we would estimate the effective reproduction number using a Markov Jump Process (MJP) model of the spread of…
In order to slow the spread of the CoViD-19 pandemic, governments around the world have enacted a wide set of policies limiting the transmission of the disease. Initially, these focused on non-pharmaceutical interventions; more recently,…