Related papers: Hesitancy, Awareness and Vaccination: A Computatio…
The development and authorization of COVID-19 vaccines has provided the clearest path forward to eliminate community spread hence end the ongoing SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. However, the limited pace at which the vaccine can be administered…
In the age of social media, where billions of internet users share information and opinions, the negative impact of pandemics is not limited to the physical world. It provokes a surge of incomplete, biased, and incorrect information, also…
For the past couple years, the Coronavirus, commonly known as COVID-19, has significantly affected the daily lives of all citizens residing in the United States by imposing several, fatal health risks that cannot go unnoticed. In response…
Based on the information communicated in press releases, and finally published towards the end of 2020 by Pfizer, Moderna and AstraZeneca, we have built up a simple Bayesian model, in which the main quantity of interest plays the role of…
Population heterogeneity, especially in individuals' contact networks, plays an important role in transmission dynamics of infectious diseases. For vaccine-preventable diseases, outstanding issues like vaccine hesitancy and availability of…
In this paper, we look at a database of tweets sorted by various keywords that could indicate the users sentiment towards covid vaccines. With social media becoming such a prevalent source of opinion, sorting and ranking tweets that hold…
Polarization of opinions about vaccination can have a negative impact on pandemic control. In this work we quantify this negative impact for the transmission of COVID-19, using an agent based simulation in an heterogeneous population with…
The paper quantifies the impact of race, poverty, politics, and age on COVID-19 vaccination rates in counties in the continental US. Both, OLS regression analysis and Random Forest machine learning algorithms are applied to quantify factors…
As infectious disease outbreaks emerge, public health agencies often enact vaccination and social distancing measures to slow transmission. Their success depends on not only strategies and resources, but also public adherence. Individual…
Inspired by contagion models of social belief formation, we develop an epistemically-informed modeling framework, SIS-Vo, in which vaccine-related information propagates on a signed opinion network. Our model allows for heterogeneous…
Twitter is one of the most popular social media platforms in the country, but pre-pandemic vaccination debate has been shown to be polarized and siloed into echo chambers. It is thus imperative to understand the nature of this discourse,…
News media has been utilized as a political tool to stray from facts, presenting biased claims without evidence. Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, politically biased news (PBN) has significantly undermined public trust in vaccines, despite strong…
In light of the continuing emergence of new SARS-CoV-2 variants and vaccines, we create a simulation framework for exploring possible infection trajectories under various scenarios. The situations of primary interest involve the interaction…
Decision making in the face of a disaster requires the consideration of several complex factors. In such cases, Bayesian multi-criteria decision analysis provides a framework for decision making. In this paper, we present how to construct a…
The COVID-19 pandemic has introduced new opportunities for health communication, including an increase in the public use of online outlets for health-related emotions. People have turned to social media networks to share sentiments related…
Vaccination is widely recognized as the most effective way of immunization against many infectious diseases. However, unfounded claims about supposed side effects of some vaccines have contributed to spread concern and fear among people,…
Epidemics and pandemics have ravaged human life since time. To combat these, novel ideas have always been created and deployed by humanity, with varying degrees of success. At this very moment, the COVID-19 pandemic is the singular global…
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…
The proliferation of online misinformation has emerged as one of the biggest threats to society. Considerable efforts have focused on building misinformation detection models, still the perils of misinformation remain abound. Mitigating…
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…