Related papers: The fallacy of herd immunity
Most governments employ a set of quasi-standard measures to fight COVID-19 including wearing masks, social distancing, virus testing, contact tracing, and vaccination. However, combining these measures into an efficient holistic pandemic…
Susceptibility governs the dynamics of contagion. The classical SIR model is one of the simplest compartmental models of contagion spread, assuming a single shared susceptibility level. However, variation in susceptibility over a population…
Consider a uniformly mixing population which grows as a super-critical linear birth and death process. At some time an infectious disease (of SIR or SEIR type) is introduced by one individual being infected from outside. It is shown that…
Our chances to halt epidemic outbreaks rely on how accurately we represent the population structure underlying the disease spread. When analyzing global epidemics this force us to consider metapopulation models taking into account intra-…
Background: To prevent future outbreaks of COVID-19, Australia is pursuing a mass-vaccination approach in which a targeted group of the population comprising healthcare workers, aged-care residents and other individuals at increased risk of…
Knowing the true effect size of clinical interventions in randomised clinical trials is key to informing the public health policies. Vaccine efficacy is defined in terms of the relative risk or the ratio of two disease risks. However, only…
The emergence of an epidemic evokes the need to monitor its spread and assess and validate any mitigation measures enacted by governments and administrative bodies in real time. We present here a method to observe and quantify this spread…
We have learned to live with many potentially deadly viruses for which there is no vaccine, no immunity, and no cure. We do not live in constant fear of these viruses, instead, we have learned how to outsmart them and reduce the harm they…
The containment of epidemic spreading is a major challenge in science. Vaccination, whenever available, is the best way to prevent the spreading, because it eventually immunizes individuals. However, vaccines are not perfect, and total…
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…
Social distancing as one of the main non-pharmaceutical interventions can help slow down the spread of diseases, like in the COVID-19 pandemic. Effective social distancing, unless enforced as drastic lockdowns and mandatory cordon…
Decline of immunity is a phenomenon characterized by immunocompromised host and plays a crucial role in the epidemiology of emerging infectious diseases (EIDs) such as COVID-19. In this paper, we propose an age-structured model with…
Often, vaccination programs are carried out based on self-interest rather than being mandatory. Owing to the perceptions about risks associated with vaccines and the `herd immunity' effect, it may provide suboptimal vaccination coverage for…
Motivated by COVID-19, we develop and analyze a simple stochastic model for a disease spread in human population. We track how the number of infected and critically ill people develops over time in order to estimate the demand that is…
Increasing the infection risk early in an epidemic is individually and socially optimal under some parameter values. The reason is that the early patients recover or die before the peak of the epidemic, which flattens the peak. This…
The COVID-19 pandemic has devastated the world in an unprecedented way, causing enormous loss of life. Time and again, public health authorities have urged people to become vaccinated to protect themselves and mitigate the spread of the…
In the absence of drugs and vaccines, policymakers use non-pharmaceutical interventions such as social distancing to decrease rates of disease-causing contact, with the aim of reducing or delaying the epidemic peak. These measures carry…
Assessing and managing the impact of large-scale epidemics considering only the individual risk and severity of the disease is exceedingly difficult and could be extremely expensive. Economic consequences, infrastructure and service…
One of the famous results of network science states that networks with heterogeneous connectivity are more susceptible to epidemic spreading than their more homogeneous counterparts. In particular, in networks of identical nodes it has been…
Vaccination is crucial for the control of epidemics. Yet it is a social dilemma since non-vaccinators can benefit from the herd immunity created by the vaccinators. Thus the optimum vaccination level is not reached via voluntary vaccination…