Related papers: Mass vaccination in a roaring pandemic
Since December 2020, variants of COVID-19 (especially Delta and Omicron) appeared with different characteristics that influenced death and transmissibility emerged around the world. To address the novel dynamics of the disease, we propose a…
We study the dynamics of an age-structured population in which the life expectancy of an offspring may be mutated with respect to that of its parent. When advantageous mutation is favored, the average fitness of the population grows…
After more than 6 million deaths worldwide, the ongoing vaccination to conquer the COVID-19 disease is now competing with the emergence of increasingly contagious mutations, repeatedly supplanting earlier strains. Following the near-absence…
Investigations of a possible connection between population density and the propagation and magnitude of epidemics have so far led to mixed and unconvincing results. There are three reasons for that. (i) Previous studies did not focus on the…
Celebrities can significantly influence the public towards any desired outcome. In a bid to tackle an infectious disease, a leader (government) exploits such influence towards motivating a fraction of public to get vaccinated, sufficient…
The adaptive immune system engages in an arms race with evolving viruses, trying to generate new responses to viral strains that continually move away from the set of variants that have already elicited a functional immune response. In…
It is widely known that the spread of the HIV virus was slower than exponential in several populations, even at the very beginning of the epidemic. We show that this implies a significant reduction in the effective reproductive rate of the…
In the pool of people seeking partners, a uniformly greater preference for abstinence increases the prevalence of infection and worsens everyone's welfare. In contrast, prevention and treatment reduce prevalence and improve payoffs. The…
We consider control of reaction and population systems by deterministically imposed transitions between the states with different numbers of particles or individuals. Even where the imposed transitions are significantly less frequent than…
Major advances in public health have resulted from disease prevention. However, prevention of a new infectious disease by vaccination or pharmaceuticals is made difficult by the slow process of vaccine and drug development. We propose an…
A key process within astronomy is the exchange of mass, momentum, and energy between diffuse plasmas in many types of astronomical sources (including planetary nebulae, wind-blown bubbles, supernova remnants, starburst superwinds, and the…
Miss-information is usually adjusted to fit distinct narratives and can propagate rapidly through communities of interest, which work as echo chambers, cause reinforcement and foster confirmation bias. False beliefs, once adopted, are…
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…
Seasonal influenza presents an ongoing challenge to public health. The rapid evolution of the flu virus necessitates annual vaccination campaigns, but the decision to get vaccinated or not in a given year is largely voluntary, at least in…
We propose a mathematical model to investigate the effects of information-dependent vaccination behavior on meningitis transmission. The information is represented by means of information index as early proposed in (d'Onofrio et al., Theor.…
The success of an infectious disease to invade a population is strongly controlled by the population's specific connectivity structure. Here a network model is presented as an aid in understanding the role of social behavior and…
Viruses like influenza have long coevolved with host immune systems, gradually shaping the evolutionary trajectory of these pathogens. Host immune systems develop immunity against circulating strains, which in turn avoid extinction by…
In response to COVID-19, many countries have mandated social distancing and banned large group gatherings in order to slow down the spread of SARS-CoV-2. These social interventions along with vaccines remain the best way forward to reduce…
The vaccination game is a social dilemma that refers to the conundrum individuals face (to get immunized or not) when the population is exposed to an infectious disease. The model has recently gained much traction due to the COVID-19…
Social network analysis is now widely used to investigate the dynamics of infectious disease spread from person to person. Vaccination dramatically disrupts the disease transmission process on a contact network, and indeed, sufficiently…