Related papers: A sampling scheme for estimating the prevalence of…
The COVID-19 pandemic has, worldwide and up to December 2020, caused over 1.7 million deaths, and put the world's most advanced healthcare systems under heavy stress. In many countries, drastic restrictive measures adopted by political…
The interpretation of sampling data plays a crucial role in policy response to the spread of a disease during an epidemic, such as the COVID-19 epidemic of 2020. However, this is a non-trivial endeavor due to the complexity of real world…
To make informative public policy decisions in battling the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, it is important to know the disease prevalence in a population. There are two intertwined difficulties in estimating this prevalence based on testing…
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…
The acute phase of the Covid-19 pandemic has made apparent the need for decision support based upon accurate epidemic modeling. This process is substantially hampered by under-reporting of cases and related data incompleteness issues. In…
Serology testing can identify past infection by quantifying the immune response of an infected individual providing important public health guidance. Individual immune responses are time-dependent, which is reflected in antibody…
A simple, but ``classical``, stochastic model for epidemic spread in a finite, but large, population is studied. The progress of the epidemic can be divided into three different phases that requires different tools to analyse. Initially the…
Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, many dashboards have emerged as useful tools to monitor the evolution of the pandemic, inform the public, and assist governments in decision making. Our goal is to develop a globally applicable…
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…
The cataclysmic contagion based calamity -- Covid-19 has shown us a clear need for a comprehensive community based strategy that overcomes the sheer complexity of controlling it and the caveats of current methods. In this regard, as seen in…
When testing for infections, the standard method is to test each subject individually. If testing methodology is such that samples from multiple subjects can be efficiently combined and tested at once, yielding a positive results if any one…
The world is suffering from a pandemic called COVID-19, caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus. National governments have problems evaluating the reach of the epidemic, due to having limited resources and tests at their disposal. This problem is…
Physical contacts result in the spread of various phenomena such as viruses, gossips, ideas, packages and marketing pamphlets across a population. The spread depends on how people move and co-locate with each other, or their mobility…
We consider the problem of deciding on sampling strategy, in particular sampling design. We propose a risk measure, whose minimizing value guides the choice. The method makes use of a superpopulation model and takes into account uncertainty…
The COVID-19 pandemic is one of the most pressing issues at present. A question which is particularly important for governments and policy makers is the following: Does the virus spread in the same way in different countries? Or are there…
Classical epidemiological models assume homogeneous populations. There have been important extensions to model heterogeneous populations, when the identity of the sub-populations is known, such as age group or geographical location. Here,…
The pandemic of COVID-19 has imposed tremendous pressure on public health systems and social economic ecosystems over the past years. To alleviate its social impact, it is important to proactively track the prevalence of COVID-19 within…
When testing for a disease such as COVID-19, the standard method is individual testing: we take a sample from each individual and test these samples separately. An alternative is pooled testing (or "group testing"), where samples are mixed…
There are many sources of data giving information about the number of SARS-CoV-2 infections in the population, but all have major drawbacks, including biases and delayed reporting. For example, the number of confirmed cases largely…
COVID-19 pandemic has reshaped our world in a timescale much shorter than what we can understand. Particularities of SARS-CoV-2, such as its persistence in surfaces and the lack of a curative treatment or vaccine against COVID-19, have…