Related papers: The fallacy of herd immunity
Empirical studies show that preference for prevention versus treatment remains a subject of debate. We build a paradigm model combining a utility game for the individual-level dilemma of prevention versus treatment, and a compartmental…
Given limited supply of approved vaccines and constrained medical resources, design of a vaccination strategy to control a pandemic is an economic problem. We use time-series and panel methods with real-world country-level data to estimate…
The potential waning of the vaccination immunity to COVID-19 could pose threats to public health, as it is tenable that the timing of such waning would synchronize with the near-complete restoration of normalcy. Should also testing be…
Epidemics of infectious diseases posing a serious risk to human health have occurred throughout history. During recent epidemics there has been much debate about policy, including how and when to impose restrictions on behaviour.…
How are economies in a modern age impacted by epidemics? In what ways is economic life disrupted? How can pandemics be modeled? What can be done to mitigate and manage the danger? Does the threat of pandemics increase or decrease in the…
We propose a model of the immunity to a cyclical epidemic disease taking account not only of seasonal boosts during the infectious season, but also of residual immunity remaining from one season to the next. The focus is on the exponential…
During the current COVID-19 pandemic it is imperative to give early warnings to reduce mortality. However, non-specialist such as authorities and the general population face several problems to understand the real thread of this pandemic,…
Until a vaccine or therapy is found against the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, reaching herd immunity appears to be the only mid-term option. However, if the number of infected individuals decreases and eventually fades only beyond this threshold,…
Accurate estimates of the reproduction ratio are crucial to project infectious disease epidemic evolution and guide public health response. Here, we prove that estimates of the reproduction ratio based on inference from surveillance data…
In this paper, we study the problem of minimizing the spread of a viral epidemic when immunization takes a non-negligible amount of time to take into effect. Specifically, our problem is to determine which set of nodes to be vaccinated when…
In a non-sustainable, "over-populated" world, what might the use of nanotechnology-based targeted, autonomous weapons mean for the future of humanity? In order to gain some insights, we make a simplified game-theoretical thought experiment.…
The World Health Organisation (WHO) has very strongly recommended testing and isolation as a strategy for controlling the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. The goal of this paper is to quantify the effects of detection and isolation in formal…
Spreading processes represent a very efficient tool to investigate the structural properties of networks and the relative importance of their constituents, and have been widely used to this aim in static networks. Here we consider simple…
An epidemic carries human and fiscal costs. In the case of imported pandemics, the first-best solution is to restrict national borders to identify and isolate infected individuals. However, when that opportunity is not fully seized and…
We present a simple technique to compare the development of the Covid-19 epidemic in different regions, based only on the time series of confirmed cases. Weekly new infections, taken for every day, are interpreted as infection potential of…
As a consequence of missing data on tests for infection and imperfect accuracy of tests, reported rates of population infection by the SARS CoV-2 virus are lower than actual rates of infection. Hence, reported rates of severe illness…
We study the critical effect of an intermittent social distancing strategy on the propagation of epidemics in adaptive complex networks. We characterize the effect of our strategy in the framework of the susceptible-infected-recovered…
After the first lockdown in response to the COVID-19 outbreak, many countries faced difficulties in balancing infection control with economics. Due to limited prior knowledge, economists began researching this issue using cost-benefit…
Since the recent introduction of several viable vaccines for SARS-CoV-2, vaccination uptake has become the key factor that will determine our success in containing the COVID-19 pandemic. We argue that game theory and social network models…
This paper investigates the effects of vaccination on the dynamics of infectious disease, which is spreading in a population concurrently with awareness. The model considers contributions to the overall awareness from a global information…