Related papers: A Mixed-Method Approach to Determining Contact Mat…
Mathematical and computational modeling approaches are increasingly used as quantitative tools in the analysis and forecasting of infectious disease epidemics. The growing need for realism in addressing complex public health questions is…
Contact (or mixing, or more generally connectivity) matrices are a fundamental component of modelling and inference for infectious disease epidemiology. Their structure and parametrisation directly accounts for the frequency of interactions…
Since a significant amount of disease transmission occurs through human-to-human or social contact, understanding who interacts with whom in time and space is essential for disease transmission modeling, prediction, and assessment of…
Understanding infectious disease transmission in institutional settings requires models that capture how contacts arise from structured routines, roles, and spatial constraints. In aged care facilities, interactions are driven by care…
Social contact studies, investigating social contact patterns in a population sample, have been an important contribution for epidemic models to better fit real life epidemics. A contact matrix $M$, having the \emph{mean} number of contacts…
Contact matrices are a commonly adopted data representation, used to develop compartmental models for epidemic spreading, accounting for the contact heterogeneities across age groups. Their estimation, however, is generally time and effort…
Contact matrices have become a key ingredient of modern epidemic models. They account for the stratification of contacts for the age of individuals and, in some cases, the context of their interactions. However, age and context are not the…
Accounting for population age structure and age-specific contact patterns is crucial for accurate modelling of human infectious disease dynamics and impact. A common approach is to use contact matrices, which estimate the number of contacts…
Social contact matrices are essential tools in infectious disease epidemiology as they quantify close-range human contact patterns which directly drive the transmission of airborne infectious diseases. In this work we propose a Bayesian…
The integration of empirical data in computational frameworks to model the spread of infectious diseases poses challenges that are becoming pressing with the increasing availability of high-resolution information on human mobility and…
The modeling of the spreading of communicable diseases has experienced significant advances in the last two decades or so. This has been possible due to the proliferation of data and the development of new methods to gather, mine and…
Socio-demographic factors influence social contact patterns and play a fundamental role in shaping the transmission dynamics of infectious diseases. However, compartment-based models of infectious disease dynamics commonly consider the…
I study the spreading of infectious diseases on heterogeneous populations. I represent the population structure by a contact-graph where vertices represent agents and edges represent disease transmission channels among them. The population…
Social contact patterns are a key input to many infectious disease models. Contact surveys, where participants are asked to provide information on their recent close and casual contacts with others, are one of the standard methods to…
Capturing the structured mixing within a population is key to the reliable projection of infectious disease dynamics and hence informed control. Both heterogeneity in the number of contacts and age-structured mixing have been repeatedly…
In this article, we investigate the importance of demographic and contact patterns in determining the spread of COVID-19 and to the effectiveness of social distancing policies. We investigate these questions proposing an augmented…
When modeling the dynamics of infectious disease, the incorporation of contact network information allows for the capture of the non-randomness and heterogeneity of realistic contact patterns. Oftentimes, it is assumed that the underlying…
Understanding how age-specific social contact patterns and susceptibility influence infectious disease transmission is crucial for accurate epidemic modeling. This study presents an eigenvector-based sensitivity analysis framework to…
We consider an age-structured epidemic model with two basic public health interventions: (i) identifying and isolating symptomatic cases, and (ii) tracing and quarantine of the contacts of identified infectives. The dynamics of the infected…
Contact networks are heterogeneous. People with similar characteristics are more likely to interact, a phenomenon called assortative mixing or homophily. While age-assortativity is well-established and social contact matrices for…