Related papers: Does the random nature of cell-virus interactions …
The infectivity of a virus sample is measured by the infections it causes, via a plaque or focus forming assay (PFU or FFU) or an endpoint dilution (ED) assay (TCID$_{50}$, CCID$_{50}$, EID$_{50}$, etc., hereafter collectively ID$_{50}$).…
Many biological assays are employed in virology to quantify parameters of interest. Two such classes of assays, virus quantification assays (VQA) and infectivity assays (IA), aim to estimate the number of viruses present in a solution, and…
Introduction. Can the infection due to the human immunodeficiency virus type 1 induce a change in the differentiation status or process in T cells?. Methods. We will consider two stochastic Markov chain models, one which will describe the…
Multiple mechanisms in the HIV lifecycle play a role in its ability to evade therapy and become a chronic, difficult-to-treat infection. Within its major cellular target, the activated T cell, many steps occur between viral entry and viral…
A virus infection can be initiated with very few or even a single infectious virion, and as such can become extinct, i.e. stochastically fail to take hold or spread significantly. There are many ways that a fully competent infectious…
The role of direct cell-to-cell spread in viral infections - where virions spread between host and susceptible cells without needing to be secreted into the extracellular environment - has come to be understood as essential to the dynamics…
In Part 1, we introduced a stochastic model of an infectious disease, based on the BDI (birth and death with immigration) process. We showed that random processes defined by this model can capture the essence of the stochastic, often…
Biological processes at the cellular level are stochastic in nature, and the immune response system is no different. Therefore, models that attempt to explain this system need to also incorporate noise or fluctuations that can account for…
This paper focuses on and analyzes realistic SIR models that take stochasticity into account. The proposed systems are applicable to most incidence rates that are used in the literature including the bilinear incidence rate, the…
The recent COVID-19 pandemic has shown that when the reproduction number is high and there are no proper measurements in place, the number of infected people can increase dramatically in a short time, producing a phenomenon that many…
Why are the epidemic patterns of COVID-19 so different among different cities or countries which are similar in their populations, medical infrastructures, and people's behavior? Why are forecasts or predictions made by so-called experts…
Stochastic epidemic models can estimate infection and removal rates, and derived quantities such as the basic reproductive number ($R_0$), when both infection and removal times are observed. In practice, however, removal times are often…
Assessing the practical identifiability of epidemic models is essential for determining whether parameters can be meaningfully estimated from observed data. Monte Carlo (MC) methods provide an accessible and intuitive framework; however,…
This study develops and analyzes a stochastic differential equation (SDE) model for the dynamics of hepatitis B virus (HBV) infection. While deterministic frameworks have yielded important insights into viral behavior, they cannot…
Epidemics are inherently stochastic, and stochastic models provide an appropriate way to describe and analyse such phenomena. Given temporal incidence data consisting of, for example, the number of new infections or removals in a given time…
In this paper, we consider a discrete-time stochastic SIR model, where the transmission rate and the true number of infectious individuals are random and unobservable. An advantage of this model is that it permits us to account for random…
Throughout the course of an epidemic, the rate at which disease spreads varies with behavioral changes, the emergence of new disease variants, and the introduction of mitigation policies. Estimating such changes in transmission rates can…
This paper introduces a way of modeling the epidemic transmission rate using a stochastic process of the form $(\beta_t = \varphi(t)P_t : t \ge 0)$, where the positive deterministic function $\varphi(t)$ models the impact of a public health…
A class of stochastic vector-borne infectious disease models is derived and studied. The class type is determined by a general nonlinear incidence rate of the disease. The disease spreads in a highly random environment with variability from…
In pharmacoepidemiology research, instrumental variables (IVs) are variables that strongly predict treatment but have no causal effect on the outcome of interest except through the treatment. There remain concerns about the inclusion of IVs…