Related papers: Testing the efficacy of epidemic testing

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…

We study the problem usually referred to as group testing in the context of COVID-19. Given n samples collected from patients, how should we select and test mixtures of samples to maximize information and minimize the number of tests? Group…

There has been much recent interest in screening populations for an infectious disease. Here, we present a stochastic-control model, wherein the optimum screening policy is provably difficult to find, but wherein Thompson sampling has…

During the COVID-19 pandemic, case isolation emerged as a key non-pharmaceutical intervention in pandemic response. Its effectiveness hinges on the timing of isolation, which is often dictated by the onset of contagiousness. While…

Coronavirus COVID-19 spreads through the population mostly based on social contact. To gauge the potential for widespread contagion, to cope with associated uncertainty and to inform its mitigation, more accurate and robust modelling is…

During the early months of the current COVID-19 pandemic, social-distancing measures effectively slowed disease transmission in many countries in Europe and Asia, but the same benefits have not been observed in some developing countries…

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…

Understanding how to effectively control an epidemic spreading on a network is a problem of paramount importance for the scientific community. The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the need for policies that mitigate the spread,…

We study the problem usually referred to as group testing in the context of COVID-19. Given $n$ samples taken from patients, how should we select mixtures of samples to be tested, so as to maximize information and minimize the number of…

In many public health settings, there is a perceived tension between allocating resources to known vulnerable areas and learning about the overall prevalence of the problem. Inspired by a door-to-door Covid-19 testing program we helped…

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.…

Simulating the spread of infectious diseases in human communities is critical for predicting the trajectory of an epidemic and verifying various policies to control the devastating impacts of the outbreak. Many existing simulators are based…

The COVID-19 pandemic left its unique mark on the 21st century as one of the most significant disasters in history, triggering governments all over the world to respond with a wide range of interventions. However, these restrictions come…

During the early part of the Covid-19 pandemic, national and local governments introduced a number of policies to combat the spread of Covid-19. In this paper, we propose a new approach to bound the effects of such early-pandemic policies…

COVID-19 testing has become a standard approach for estimating prevalence which then assist in public health decision making to contain and mitigate the spread of the disease. The sampling designs used are often biased in that they do not…

The CoVid-19 is spreading pandemically all over the world. A rapid defeat of the pandemic requires carrying out on the population a mass screening, able to separate positive from negative cases. Such a cleaning will free a flow of…

In this study, we present a new epidemiological model, with contamination from confirmed and unreported. We also compute equilibria and study their stability without intervention strategies. Optimal control theory has proven to be a…

We have a large number of samples and we want to find the infected ones using as few number of tests as possible. We can use group testing which tells about a small group of people whether at least one of them is infected. Group testing is…

Since the beginning of 2020, the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has spread rapidly in the city of Wuhan, P.R. China, and subsequently, across the world. The swift spread of the virus is largely attributed to its stealth transmissions…

Repeated asymptomatic screening for SARS-CoV-2 promises to control spread of the virus but would require too many resources to implement at scale. Group testing is promising for screening more people with fewer test resources: multiple…