Related papers: Using Timeliness in Tracking Infections
Testing symptomatic individuals for a disease can deliver treatment resources, if tests' results turn positive, which speeds up their treatment and might also decrease individuals' contacts to other ones. An imperfect test, however, might…
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 outbreak of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) is unfolding as a major international crisis whose influence extends to every aspect of our daily lives. Effective testing allows infected individuals to be quarantined, thus reducing the…
In the group testing problem we aim to identify a small number of infected individuals within a large population. We avail ourselves to a procedure that can test a group of multiple individuals, with the test result coming out positive iff…
Algorithms for identifying the infection states of nodes in a network are crucial for understanding and containing infections. Often, however, only a relatively small set of nodes have a known infection state. Moreover, the length of time…
Group testing can save testing resources in the context of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. In group testing, we are given $n$ samples, one per individual, and arrange them into $m < n$ pooled samples, where each pool is obtained by mixing a…
Traditional disease transmission models assume that the infectious period is exponentially distributed with a recovery rate fixed in time and across individuals. This assumption provides analytical and computational advantages, however it…
Today, tracking and controlling the spread of a virus is a crucial need for almost all countries. Doing this early would save millions of lives and help countries keep a stable economy. The easiest way to control the spread of a virus is to…
We use real-world contact sequences, time-ordered lists of contacts from one person to another, to study how fast information or disease can spread across network of contacts. Specifically we measure the reachability time -- the average…
In this paper, we explore whether the infection-rate of a disease can serve as a robust monitoring variable in epidemiological surveillance algorithms. The infection-rate is dependent on population mixing patterns that do not vary…
COVID-19 data released by public health authorities features the presence of notable time-delays, corresponding to the difference between actual time of infection and identification of infection. These delays have several causes, including…
One of the most significant challenges in combating against the spread of infectious diseases was the difficulty in estimating the true magnitude of infections. Unreported infections could drive up disease spread, making it very hard to…
We propose a mathematical model to analyze the time evolution of the total number of infected population with Covid-19 disease at a region in the ongoing pandemic. Using the available data of Covid-19 infected population on various…
Early outbreak detection is a key aspect in the containment of infectious diseases, as it enables the identification and isolation of infected individuals before the disease can spread to a larger population. Instead of detecting unexpected…
Group testing is an efficient method for testing a large population to detect infected individuals. In this paper, we consider an efficient adaptive two stage group testing scheme. Using a straightforward analysis, we characterize the…
Identifying the infection status of each individual during infectious diseases informs public health management. However, performing frequent individual-level tests may not be feasible. Instead, sparse and sometimes group-level tests are…
Understanding the spread of SARS-CoV-2 has been one of the most pressing problems of the recent past. Network models present a potent approach to studying such spreading phenomena because of their ability to represent complex social…
Strategic test allocation plays a major role in the control of both emerging and existing pandemics (e.g., COVID-19, HIV). Widespread testing supports effective epidemic control by (1) reducing transmission via identifying cases, and (2)…
The symptoms of many infectious diseases influence their host to withdraw from social activity limiting their own potential to spread. Successful transmission therefore requires the onset of infectiousness to coincide with a time when its…
Since the beginning of the epidemic, daily reports of CoViD-19 cases, hospitalizations, and deaths from around the world have been publicly available. This paper describes methods to characterize broad features of the spread of the disease,…