Related papers: Optimal virulence strategies in epidemiological mo…
The emergence or adaptation of pathogens may lead to epidemics, highlighting the need for a thorough understanding of pathogen evolution. The tradeoff hypothesis suggests that virulence evolves to reach an optimal transmission intensity…
Models are often employed to integrate knowledge about epidemics across scales and simulate disease dynamics. While these approaches have played a central role in studying the mechanics underlying epidemics, we lack ways to reliably predict…
Epidemic spreading over populations networks has been an important subject of research for several decades, and especially during the Covid-19 pandemic. Most epidemic outbreaks are likely to create multiple mutations during their spreading…
Despite being similar in structure, functioning, and size viral pathogens enjoy very different mostly well-defined ways of life. They occupy their hosts for a few days (influenza), for a few weeks (measles), or even lifelong (HCV), which…
This paper explores a number of questions regarding optimal strategies evolved by viruses upon entry into a vertebrate host. The infected cell life cycle consists of a non-productively infected stage in which it is producing virions but not…
Antigenic escape constitutes the main mechanism allowing rapidly evolving viruses to achieve endemicity. Beyond granting immune escape, empirical evidence also suggests that mutations of viruses might increase their inter-host…
The COVID-19 epidemic has been spreading around the world for nearly three years, and asymptomatic infections have exacerbated the spread of the epidemic. To evaluate the role of asymptomatic infections in the spread of the epidemic, we…
The dynamics of epidemic spreading is often reduced to the single control parameter $R_0$, whose value, above or below unity, determines the state of the contagion. If, however, the pathogen evolves as it spreads, $R_0$ may change over…
The surprisingly mercurial Covid-19 pandemic has highlighted the need to not only accelerate research on infectious disease, but to also study them using novel techniques and perspectives. A major contributor to the difficulty of containing…
Cooperation and competition between pathogens can alter the amount of individuals affected by a co-infection. Nonetheless, the evolution of the pathogens' behavior has been overlooked. Here, we consider a co-evolutionary model where the…
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…
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…
We study how the interplay between the memory immune response and pathogen mutation affects epidemic dynamics in two related models. The first explicitly models pathogen mutation and individual memory immune responses, with contacted…
This paper investigates the dynamics of infectious diseases with a non-exponentially distributed infectious period. This is achieved by considering a multi-stage infection model on networks. Using pairwise approximation with a standard…
Human pathogens transmitted through environmental pathways are subject to stress and pressures outside of the host. These pressures may cause pathogen pathovars to diverge in their environmental persistence and their infectivity on an…
Despite the advanced stage of epidemic modeling, there is a major demand for methods to incorporate behavioral responses to the spread of a disease such as social distancing and adoption of prevention methods. Mobility plays an important…
The theory of life history evolution provides a powerful framework to understand the evolutionary dynamics of pathogens in both epidemic and endemic situations. This framework, however, relies on the assumption that pathogen populations are…
Between pandemics, the influenza virus exhibits periods of incremental evolution via a process known as antigenic drift. This process gives rise to a sequence of strains of the pathogen that are continuously replaced by newer strains,…
Rapidly mutating pathogens may be able to persist in the population and reach an endemic equilibrium by escaping hosts' acquired immunity. For such diseases, multiple biological, environmental and population-level mechanisms determine the…