Related papers: Group Testing under Superspreading Dynamics
Group testing is the combinatorial problem of identifying the defective items in a population by grouping items into test pools. Recently, nonadaptive group testing - where all the test pools must be decided on at the start - has been…
Testing for infection with SARS-CoV-2 is an important intervention in reducing onwards transmission of COVID-19, particularly when combined with the isolation and contact-tracing of positive cases. Many countries with the capacity to do so…
Contact tracing, the practice of isolating individuals who have been in contact with infected individuals, is an effective and practical way of containing disease spread. Here, we show that this strategy is particularly effective in the…
Developing the ability to comprehensively study infections in small populations enables us to improve epidemic models and better advise individuals about potential risks to their health. We currently have a limited understanding of how…
Group testing is one of the fundamental problems in coding theory and combinatorics in which one is to identify a subset of contaminated items from a given ground set. There has been renewed interest in group testing recently due to its…
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…
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 first part of the paper presents a review of the gold-standard testing protocol for Covid-19, real-time, reverse transcriptase PCR, and its properties and associated measurement data such as amplification curves that can guide the…
In this paper, we provide insights on how much testing and social distancing is required to control COVID-19. To this end, we develop a compartmental model that accounts for key aspects of the disease: 1) incubation time, 2) age-dependent…
We present a System Dynamics (SD) model of the Covid-19 pandemic spread in India. The detailed age-structured compartment-based model endogenously captures various disease transmission pathways, expanding significantly from the standard…
We consider a version of the classical group testing problem motivated by PCR testing for COVID-19. In the so-called tropical group testing model, the outcome of a test is the lowest cycle threshold (Ct) level of the individuals pooled…
We consider the problem of group testing (pooled testing), first introduced by Dorfman. For non-adaptive testing strategies, we refer to a non-defective item as `intruding' if it only appears in positive tests. Such items cause…
The COVID-19 is sweeping the world with deadly consequences. Its contagious nature and clinical similarity to other pneumonias make separating subjects contracted with COVID-19 and non-COVID-19 viral pneumonia a priority and a challenge.…
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…
We study viral transmission in crowds via the short-ranged airborne pathway using a purely model-based approach. Our goal is two-pronged. Firstly, we illustrate with a concrete and pedagogical case study how to estimate the risks of new…
A key public health problem during an outbreak is to reconstruct the disease cascade from a partial set of confirmed infections. This has been studied extensively under the Maximum Likelihood Estimation (MLE) formulation, which reduces the…
In order to identify the infected individuals of a population, their samples are divided in equally sized groups called pools and a single laboratory test is applied to each pool. Individuals whose samples belong to pools that test negative…
This paper is based on the observation that, during Covid-19 epidemic, the choice of which individuals should be tested has an important impact on the effectiveness of selective confinement measures. This decision problem is closely related…
We propose a mathematical model based on probability theory to optimize COVID-19 testing by a multi-step batch testing approach with variable batch sizes. This model and simulation tool dramatically increase the efficiency and efficacy of…
Non-adaptive group testing refers to the problem of inferring a sparse set of defectives from a larger population using the minimum number of simultaneous pooled tests. Recent positive results for noiseless group testing have motivated the…