Related papers: The fallacy of herd immunity
The decision of whether or not to vaccinate is a complex one. It involves the contribution both to a social good -- herd immunity -- and to one's own well being. It is informed by social influence, personal experience, education, and mass…
High impact epidemics constitute one of the largest threats humanity is facing in the 21st century. Testing, contact tracing and quarantining are critical in slowing down epidemic dynamics, but may prove insufficient for highly contagious…
Vaccination campaigns have both direct and indirect effects that act to control an infectious disease as it spreads through a population. Indirect effects arise when vaccinated individuals block disease transmission in any infection chains…
From the moment the first COVID-19 vaccines are rolled out, there will need to be a large fraction of the global population ready in line. It is therefore crucial to start managing the growing global hesitancy to any such COVID-19 vaccine.…
The contact structure of a population plays an important role in transmission of infection. Many ``structured models'' capture aspects of the contact structure through an underlying network or a mixing matrix. An important observation in…
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 consider a predator-prey population model with prey gathering together for defense purposes. A transmissible unrecoverable disease affects the prey. We characterize the system behavior, establishing that ultimately either only the…
A quantitative COVID-19 model that incorporates hidden asymptomatic patients is developed, and an analytic solution in parametric form is given. The model incorporates the impact of lockdown and resulting spatial migration of population due…
The COVID-19 pandemic, caused by the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, has led to a wide range of non-pharmaceutical interventions being implemented around the world to curb transmission. However, the economic and social costs of some of these…
The Susceptible-Infected-Recovered (SIR) model is the cornerstone of epidemiological models. However, this specification depends on two parameters only, which implies a lack of flexibility and the difficulty to replicate the volatile…
Risk-driven behavior provides a feedback mechanism through which individuals both shape and are collectively affected by an epidemic. We introduce a general and flexible compartmental model to study the effect of heterogeneity in the…
Seasonal influenza is a significant public health concern in the United States and globally. While influenza vaccines are the single most effective intervention to reduce influenza morbidity and mortality, there is considerable debate…
In this study, we explore the dynamic interplay between the timing of vaccination campaigns and the trajectory of disease spread in a population. Through comprehensive data analysis and modeling, we have uncovered a counter-intuitive…
Herd immunity is a critical concept in epidemiology, describing a threshold at which a sufficient proportion of a population is immune, either through infection or vaccination, thereby preventing sustained transmission of a pathogen. In the…
We define and analyze an inductive reasoning game of voluntary yearly vaccination in order to establish whether or not a population of individuals acting in their own self-interest would be able to prevent influenza epidemics. We find that…
Epidemic control frequently relies on adjusting interventions based on prevalence. But designing such policies is a highly non-trivial problem due to uncertain intervention effects, costs and the difficulty of quantifying key transmission…
Several recent studies have tackled the issue of optimal network immunization by providing efficient criteria to identify key nodes to be removed in order to break apart a network, thus preventing the occurrence of extensive epidemic…
We study the influence of the rate of the attainment of herd immunity (HI), in the absence of an approved vaccine, on the vulnerable population. We essentially ask the question: how hard the evolution towards the desired herd immunity could…
Population heterogeneity, especially in individuals' contact networks, plays an important role in transmission dynamics of infectious diseases. For vaccine-preventable diseases, outstanding issues like vaccine hesitancy and availability of…
Conventional wisdom holds that influenza A and B are such genetically dissimilar viruses that infection with one cannot confer cross-immunity to the other. However, our examination of the records of the past 25 influenza seasons in the U.S.…