Related papers: The fallacy of herd immunity
During the COVID-19 pandemic, it became evident that the effectiveness of applying intervention measures is significantly influenced by societal acceptance, which, in turn, is affected by the processes of opinion formation. This article…
We propose a simple rule of thumb for countries which have embarked on a vaccination campaign while still facing the need to keep non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPI) in place because of the ongoing spread of SARS-CoV-2. If the aim is to…
To contain the propagation of emerging diseases that are transmissible from human to human, non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) aimed at reducing the interactions between humans are usually implemented. One example of the latter kind of…
We estimate patterns of covariation between COVID-19 vaccination rates and a set of widely used indicators of human, social, and economic capital across 146 countries in July 2021 and February 2022. About 70% of the variability in COVID-19…
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…
For over a century, immunology has masterfully discovered and dissected the components of our immune system, yet its collective behavior remains fundamentally unpredictable. In this perspective, we argue that building on the learnings of…
The death toll for Covid-19 may be reduced by dividing the population into two classes, the vulnerable and the fit, with different lockdown regimes. Instead of one reproduction number there now are four parameters. These make it possible to…
With COVID-19 having emerged as the most widespread human pandemic disease in a century, the need to control its spread to avoid massive loss of life became more than necessary, and extremely fast. Several vaccines were developed and the…
This paper is a survey paper on stochastic epidemic models. A simple stochastic epidemic model is defined and exact and asymptotic model properties (relying on a large community) are presented. The purpose of modelling is illustrated by…
Balancing social utility and equity in distributing limited vaccines represents a critical policy concern for protecting against the prolonged COVID-19 pandemic. What is the nature of the trade-off between maximizing collective welfare and…
We study the impact of vaccination on the risk of epidemics spreading through structured networks using the cavity method of statistical physics. We relax the assumption that vaccination prevents all transmission of a disease used in…
The behaviour of individuals is a main actor in the control of the spread of a communicable disease and, in turn, the spread of an infectious disease can trigger behavioural changes in a population. Here, we study the emergence of the…
In the recent COVID-19 pandemic we assisted at a sequence of epidemic waves intertwined by anomalous fade-outs with periods of low but persistent epidemic prevalence. These long-living epidemic states complicate epidemic control and…
Inspired by Minority Games, we constructed a novel individual-level game of adaptive decision-making based on the dilemma of deciding whether to participate in voluntary influenza vaccination programs. The proportion of the population…
Successful predictive modeling of epidemics requires an understanding of the implicit feedback control strategies which are implemented by populations to modulate the spread of contagion. While this task of capturing endogenous behavior can…
COVID-19 pandemic is one of the major disasters that humanity has ever faced. In this paper, we try to model the effect of vaccination in controlling the pandemic, particularly in context to the third wave which is predicted to hit…
Metapopulation models are commonly used in ecology, evolution, and epidemiology. These models usually entail homogeneity assumptions within patches and study networks of migration between patches to generate insights into conservation of…
In many real-world complex systems, individuals have many kind of interactions among them, suggesting that it is necessary to consider a layered structure framework to model systems such as social interactions. This structure can be…
Mass vaccination produces a reduction in virus circulation, but also evolutive pressure towards the appearance of virus-resistant strains. We discuss the balance between these two effects, in particular when the mass vaccination takes place…
The understanding of epidemics on networks has greatly benefited from the recent application of message-passing approaches, which allow to derive exact results for irreversible spreading (i.e. diseases with permanent acquired immunity) in…