Related papers: The fallacy of herd immunity
We generalize the Susceptible-Infected-Removed model for epidemics to take into account generic effects of heterogeneity in the degree of susceptibility to infection in the population. We introduce a single new parameter corresponding to a…
Recently, [8] has proposed that heterogeneity of infectiousness (and susceptibility) across individuals in infectious diseases, plays a major role in affecting the Herd Immunity Threshold (HIT). Such heterogeneity has been observed in…
Motivated by the increasing number of COVID-19 cases that have been observed in many countries after the vaccination and relaxation of non-pharmaceutical interventions, we propose a mathematical model on time-varying networks for the spread…
The recent COVID-19 pandemic has led to an increasing interest in the modeling and analysis of infectious diseases. The pandemic has made a significant impact on the way we behave and interact in our daily life. The past year has witnessed…
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…
We present two new models for interacting populations subject to a transmissible disease. The novelty lies in the assumption that herd behavior influences the disease incidence, rather than the demographic description of the interactions,…
The synthetic control method is an empirical methodology forcausal inference using observational data. By observing thespread of COVID-19 throughout the world, we analyze the dataon the number of deaths and cases in different regions…
Opposition to vaccination has long been a non-negligible public health phenomenon resulted from people's varied perceptions toward vaccination (e.g., vaccine-phobia). This paper investigates the voluntary vaccination behavior of a…
The infection fatality rate (IFR) of COVID-19 is one of the measures of disease impact that can be of importance for policy making. Here we show that many of the studies on which these estimates are based are scientifically flawed for…
This paper studies if and to which extent COVID-19 epidemics can be controlled by authorities taking decisions on public health measures on the basis of daily reports of swab test results, active cases and total cases. A suitably simplified…
Social dilemmas where the good of a group is at odds with individual interests are usually considered as static -- the dilemma does not change over time. In the COVID-19 pandemic, social dilemmas occurred in the mitigation of epidemic…
Complex networks such as the sexual partnership web or the Internet often show a high degree of redundancy and heterogeneity in their connectivity properties. This peculiar connectivity provides an ideal environment for the spreading of…
As infectious disease outbreaks emerge, public health agencies often enact vaccination and social distancing measures to slow transmission. Their success depends on not only strategies and resources, but also public adherence. Individual…
The success of a vaccination program is crucially dependent on its adoption by a critical fraction of the population, as the resulting herd immunity prevents future outbreaks of an epidemic. However, the effectiveness of a campaign can…
In this paper we conduct a simulation study of the spread of an epidemic like COVID-19 with temporary immunity on finite spatial and non-spatial network models. In particular, we assume that an epidemic spreads stochastically on a…
Epidemiological models are an important tool in coping with epidemics, as they offer a forecast, even if often simplistic, of the behavior of the disease in the population. This allows responsible health agencies to organize themselves and…
Why do some females menstruate at all? Answering this question has implications for understanding the tight links between reproductive function and organismal immunity. Here we build on the growing evidence that menstruation is the…
No, they can't. Epidemic spread is characterized by exponentially growing dynamics, which are intrinsically unpredictable. The time at which the growth in the number of infected individuals halts and starts decreasing cannot be calculated…
Models for epidemic spread typically account for variable risk factors but do not account for the correlation between behavior and risk. Here we extend these models to account for such correlations. We find that a positive correlation…
Infectious disease outbreaks have precipitated a profusion of mathematical models. Epidemic curves predicted by these models are typically qualitatively similar, despite distinct model assumptions, but there is no theoretical explanation…