Related papers: The fallacy of herd immunity
The problem of targeted network immunization can be defined as the one of finding a subset of nodes in a network to immunize or vaccinate in order to minimize a tradeoff between the cost of vaccination and the final (stationary) expected…
COVID-19 will be a continuous threat to human population despite having a few vaccines at hand until we reach the endemic state through natural herd immunity and total immunization through universal vaccination. However, the vaccine acts as…
The traditional long-term solutions for epidemic control involve eradication or population immunity. Here, we analytically derive the existence of a third viable solution: a stable equilibrium at low case numbers, where…
In the context of the recent COVID-19 outbreak, quarantine has been used to "flatten the curve" and slow the spread of the disease. In this paper, we show that this is not the only benefit of quarantine for the mitigation of an SIR epidemic…
We analyze the effect of homophily in the diffusion of a harmful state between two groups of agents that differ in immunization rates. Homophily has a very different impact on the steady state infection level (that is increasing in…
I employ a simple mathematical model of an epidemic process to evaluate how four basic quantities: the reproduction number (R), the numbers of sensitive (S) and infectious individuals(I), and total community size (N) affect strategies to…
We performed a thorough sensitivity analysis of the herd immunity threshold for discrete-time SIR compartmental models with a static network structure. We find unexpectedly that these models violate classical intuition which holds that the…
Restrictions on social and economic activities, as well as vaccinations, have been a key intervention in containing the COVID-19 epidemic. Our work focuses on better understanding the options available to policymakers under the conditions…
Compartmental models of epidemics are widely used to forecast the effects of communicable diseases such as COVID-19 and to guide policy. Although it has long been known that such processes take place on social networks, the assumption of…
The diffusion of COVID19 is calling governments and public health authorities to interventions that limit new infections and contain the expected number of critical cases and deaths. Most of these measures rely on the compliance of people,…
In this paper we introduce a compartmental epidemic model describing the transmission of the COVID-19 disease in presence of non-mandatory vaccination. The model takes into account the hesitancy and refusal of vaccination. To this aim, we…
Purpose: Only few companies were able to produce vaccine again COVID-19. Thus, one producer supplied it to many countries. The distribution was not effective. Some countries overstocked the vaccine while other countries were not able to buy…
Face masks have been widely used as a protective measure against COVID-19. However, pre-pandemic empirical studies have produced mixed statistical results on the effectiveness of masks against respiratory viruses. The implications of the…
Given multiple new COVID-19 variants are continuously emerging, non-pharmaceutical interventions are still primary control strategies to curb the further spread of coronavirus. However, implementing strict interventions over extended…
The term emergence is increasingly used across scientific disciplines to describe phenomena that arise from interactions among a system's components but cannot be readily inferred by examining those components in isolation. While often…
This technical report describes a dynamic causal model of the spread of coronavirus through a population. The model is based upon ensemble or population dynamics that generate outcomes, like new cases and deaths over time. The purpose of…
An interesting inference drawn by some Covid-19 epidemiological models is that there exists a proportion of the population who are not susceptible to infection -- even at the start of the current pandemic. This paper introduces a model of…
The dynamics of herd immunity depend crucially on the interaction between collective social behavior and disease transmission, but the role of heterogeneity in this context frequently remains unclear. Here, we dissect this co-evolutionary…
COVID-19 is a global epidemic. Till now, there is no remedy for this epidemic. However, isolation and social distancing are seemed to be effective preventive measures to control this pandemic. Therefore, in this paper, an optimization…
Multi-model prediction efforts in infectious disease modeling and climate modeling involve multiple teams independently producing projections under various scenarios. Often these scenarios are produced by the presence and absence of a…