Related papers: A New Rapid Test to End COVID

Since the first case of COVID-19 disease in Wuhan in December 2019, there is a worldwide struggle to reduce the transmission of acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus SARS-CoV-2. Many countries worldwide decided to impose local lockdowns in…

With the present highly infectious dominant SARS-CoV-2 strain of B1.1.529 or Omicron spreading around the globe, there is concern that the COVID-19 pandemic will not end soon and that it will be a race against time until a more contagious…

The response of many governments to the COVID-19 pandemic has involved measures to control within- and between-household transmission, providing motivation to improve understanding of the absolute and relative risks in these contexts. Here,…

The latest severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) variant Omicron (B.1.1.529) has ushered panic responses around the world due to its contagious and vaccine escape mutations. The essential infectivity and antibody…

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…

The potential waning of the vaccination immunity to COVID-19 could pose threats to public health, as it is tenable that the timing of such waning would synchronize with the near-complete restoration of normalcy. Should also testing be…

Widespread vaccination campaigns have changed the landscape for COVID-19, vastly altering symptoms and reducing morbidity and mortality. We estimate trends in mortality by month of admission and vaccination status among those hospitalised…

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…

Given limited supply of approved vaccines and constrained medical resources, design of a vaccination strategy to control a pandemic is an economic problem. We use time-series and panel methods with real-world country-level data to estimate…

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,…

During Covid-19 outbreaks, school closures are employed as part of governments' non-pharmaceutical interventions around the world to reduce the number of contacts and keep the reproduction number below 1. Yet, prolonged school closures have…

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…

One of the difficulties in monitoring an ongoing pandemic is deciding on the metric that best describes its status when multiple intercorrelated measurements are available. Having a single measure, such as the effective reproduction number…

Several SARS-CoV-2 variants that evolved during the COVID-19 pandemic have appeared to differ in severity, based on analyses of single-country datasets. With decreased SARS-CoV-2 testing and sequencing, international collaborative studies…

The COVID-19 pandemic has plagued the world for months. The U.S. has taken measures to counter it. On a daily basis, newly confirmed cases have been reported. In the early days, these numbers showed an increasing trend. Recently, the…

Background: Trends in hospitalised case-fatality risk (HFR), risk of intensive care unit (ICU) admission and lengths of stay for patients hospitalised for COVID-19 in England over the pre-vaccination era are unknown. Methods: Data on…

Background: Rapid testing for an infection is paramount during a pandemic to prevent continued viral spread and excess morbidity and mortality. This study aimed to determine whether alternative testing strategies based on sample pooling can…

Despite the introduction of vaccines, Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) remains a worldwide dilemma, continuously developing new variants such as Delta and the recent Omicron. The current standard for testing is through polymerase chain…

Background: During 2021 several new variants of the SARS-CoV-2 virus appeared with both increased levels of transmissibility and virulence with respect to the original wild variant. The Delta (B.1.617.2) variation, first seen in India,…

We propose a simple rule of thumb for countries which have embarked on a vaccination campaign while still facing the need to keep non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPI) in place because of the ongoing spread of SARS-CoV-2. If the aim is to…