Related papers: The context-specificity of virulence evolution rev…
How will the novel coronavirus evolve? I study a simple epidemiological model, in which mutations may change the properties of the virus and its associated disease stochastically and antigenic drifts allow new variants to partially evade…
Several pathogens use evolvability as a survival strategy against acquired immunity of the host. Despite their high variability in time, some of them exhibit quite low variability within the population at any given time, a somehow…
A current challenge for disease modeling and public health is understanding pathogen dynamics across scales since their ecology and evolution ultimately operate on several coupled scales. This is particularly true for vector-borne diseases,…
Many pathogens spread primarily via direct contact between infected and susceptible hosts. Thus, the patterns of contacts or contact network of a population fundamentally shapes the course of epidemics. While there is a robust and growing…
We propose an epidemic model for the spread of vector-borne diseases. The model, which is built extending the classical susceptible-infected-susceptible model, accounts for two populations -- humans and vectors -- and for cross-contagion…
We consider multiple diseases spreading in a static Configuration Model network. We make standard assumptions that infection transmits from neighbor to neighbor at a disease-specific rate and infected individuals recover at a…
Mathematical models of infectious diseases, which are in principle analytically tractable, use two general approaches. The first approach, generally known as compartmental modeling, addresses the time evolution of disease propagation at the…
The global public health landscape is perpetually challenged by the looming threat of infectious diseases. Central to addressing this concern is the imperative to prevent and manage disease transmission during pandemics, particularly in…
This paper analyzes a simplified model of viral infection and evolution using the 'grand canonical ensemble' and formalisms from statistical mechanics and thermodynamics to enumerate all possible viruses and to derive thermodynamic…
Infectious diseases that incorporate pre-symptomatic transmission are challenging to monitor, model, predict and contain. We address this scenario by studying a variant of a stochastic susceptible-exposed-infected-recovered model on…
Seasonal variation in environmental variables, and in rates of contact among individuals, are fundamental drivers of infectious disease dynamics. Unlike most periodically-forced physical systems, for which the precise pattern of forcing is…
Infectious diseases are caused by pathogenic microorganisms and can spread through different ways. Mathematical models and computational simulation have been used extensively to investigate the transmission and spread of infectious…
In this work we have investigated the evolutionary dynamics of a generalist pathogen, e.g. a virus population, that evolves towards specialisation in an environment with multiple host types. We have particularly explored under which…
Viruses evolve in the background of host immune systems that exert selective pressure and drive viral evolutionary trajectories. This interaction leads to different evolutionary patterns in antigenic space. Examples observed in nature…
Risk-driven behavior provides a feedback mechanism through which individuals both shape and are collectively affected by an epidemic. We introduce a general and flexible compartmental model to study the effect of heterogeneity in the…
We present a methodology providing a one-directional link from within-host individual heterogeneity to population-level disease transmission dynamics. The methodology works in several steps. A within-host model is investigated numerically…
Models of disease spreading are critical for predicting infection growth in a population and evaluating public health policies. However, standard models typically represent the dynamics of disease transmission between individuals using…
A pressing question resulting from global warming is how infectious diseases will be affected by climate change. Answering this question requires research into the effects of weather on the population dynamics of transmission and infection;…
Forecasting the change in the distribution of viral variants is crucial for therapeutic design and disease surveillance. This task poses significant modeling challenges due to the sharp differences in virus distributions across…
The recent COVID-19 pandemic has led to an increasing interest in the modeling and analysis of infectious diseases. The pandemic has made a significant impact on the way we behave and interact in our daily life. The past year has witnessed…