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If we can lower the number of people needed to vaccinate for a community to be immune against contagious diseases, we can save resources and life. A key to reach such a lower threshold of immunization is to find and vaccinate people who,…
During an epidemic control, the containment of the disease is usually achieved through increasing devoted resource to shorten the duration of infectiousness. However, the impact of this resource expenditure has not been studied…
We consider three regions with different public health conditions. In the absence of migration among these regions, the first two have good health conditions and the disease free state is stable; for the third region, on the other hand, the…
As observed during the COVID-19 pandemic, high-income countries, such as the U.S., may exhibit vaccine nationalism during a pandemic: stockpiling doses of vaccine for their own citizens and being reluctant to distribute doses of the vaccine…
In the absence of drugs and vaccines, policymakers use non-pharmaceutical interventions such as social distancing to decrease rates of disease-causing contact, with the aim of reducing or delaying the epidemic peak. These measures carry…
Optimal strategies for epidemic containment are focused on dismantling the contact network through effective immunization with minimal costs. However, network fragmentation is seldom accessible in practice and may present extreme side…
By the end of 2020, a year since the first cases of infection by the Covid-19 virus have been reported, there is a light at the end of the tunnel. Several pharmaceutical companies made significant progress in developing effective vaccines…
We introduce a novel compartmental model accounting for the effects of vaccine efficacy, deployment rates and timing of initiation of deployment. We simulate different scenarios and initial conditions, and we find that higher abundancy and…
In this paper, we study the optimal control for an SEIR model adapted to the vaccination strategy of susceptible individuals. There are factors associated with a vaccination campaign that make this strategy not only a public health issue…
The decision of whether or not to vaccinate is a complex one. It involves the contribution both to a social good -- herd immunity -- and to one's own well being. It is informed by social influence, personal experience, education, and mass…
Understanding the timing of the peak of a disease outbreak forms an important part of epidemic forecasting. In many cases, such information is essential for planning increased hospital bed demand and for designing of public health…
We investigate stochastic extinction in an epidemic model and the impact of random vaccinations in large populations formulated in terms of an optimal escape path. We find that different random vaccination strategies can have widely…
Vaccination is crucial for the control of epidemics. Yet it is a social dilemma since non-vaccinators can benefit from the herd immunity created by the vaccinators. Thus the optimum vaccination level is not reached via voluntary vaccination…
Testing is a crucial control mechanism for an epidemic outbreak because it enables the health authority to detect and isolate the infected cases, thereby limiting the disease transmission to susceptible people, when no effective treatment…
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.…
We analyze an optimal control version of a simple SIR epidemiology model that includes a partially specified vaccination policy and takes into account fatigue from protracted application of social distancing measures. The model assumes…
This paper studies an optimal control problem for a class of SIR epidemic models, in scenarios in which the infected population is constrained to be lower than a critical threshold imposed by the ICU (intensive care unit) capacity. The…
Epidemic control frequently relies on adjusting interventions based on prevalence. But designing such policies is a highly non-trivial problem due to uncertain intervention effects, costs and the difficulty of quantifying key transmission…
How to prevent the spread of human diseases is a great challenge for the scientific community and so far there are many studies in which immunization strategies have been developed. However, these kind of strategies usually do not consider…
The initial period of vaccination shows strong heterogeneity between countries' vaccinations rollout, both in the terms of the start of the vaccination process and in the dynamics of the number of people that are vaccinated. A predominant…