Related papers: Cost-Effective Strategies for Infectious Diseases:…
To make informed health policy decisions regarding a treatment, we must consider both its cost and its clinical effectiveness. In past work, we introduced the net benefit separation (NBS) as a novel measure of cost-effectiveness. The NBS is…
This study develops an economic model for a social planner who prioritizes health over short-term wealth accumulation during a pandemic. Agents are connected through a weighted undirected network of contacts, and the planner's objective is…
Long-term care facilities have been widely affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. Retirement homes are particularly vulnerable due to the higher mortality risk of infected elderly individuals. Once an outbreak occurs, suppressing the spread of…
Policymakers commonly employ non-pharmaceutical interventions to manage the scale and severity of pandemics. Of non-pharmaceutical interventions, social distancing policies -- designed to reduce person-to-person pathogenic spread -- have…
Early outbreak detection is a key aspect in the containment of infectious diseases, as it enables the identification and isolation of infected individuals before the disease can spread to a larger population. Instead of detecting unexpected…
The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the United Nations provide a blueprint of a better future by 'leaving no one behind', and, to achieve the SDGs by 2030, poor countries require immense volumes of development aid. In this paper, we…
The investment of time and resources for better strategies and methodologies to tackle a potential pandemic is key to deal with potential outbreaks of new variants or other viruses in the future. In this work, we recreated the scene of a…
During the COVID-19 pandemic, the scientific community developed predictive models to evaluate potential governmental interventions. However, the analysis of the effects these interventions had is less advanced. Here, we propose a…
The primary tool for predicting infectious disease spread and intervention effectiveness is the mass action Susceptible-Infected-Recovered model of Kermack and McKendrick. Its usefulness derives largely from its conceptual and mathematical…
We present a local spread model of disease transmission on a regular network and compare different control options ranging from treating the whole population to local control in a well-defined neighborhood of an infectious individual.…
In many epidemiological and ecological contexts, there is a trade-off between infections and interactions. This arises because the links between individuals capable of spreading infections are also often associated with beneficial…
Without vaccines and treatments, societies must rely on non-pharmaceutical intervention strategies to control the spread of emerging diseases such as COVID-19. Though complete lockdown is epidemiologically effective, because it eliminates…
Infectious disease modeling is used to forecast epidemics and assess the effectiveness of intervention strategies. Although the core assumption of mass-action models of homogeneously mixed population is often implausible, they are…
Efficient allocation of limited medical resources is crucial for controlling epidemic spreading on networks. Based on the susceptible-infected-susceptible model, we solve an optimization problem as how best to allocate the limited resources…
Mathematical models are a powerful tool to study infectious disease dynamics and intervention strategies against them in social systems. However, due to their detailed implementation and steep computational requirements, practitioners and…
Understanding age-group dynamics of infectious diseases is a fundamental issue for both scientific study and policymaking. Age-structure epidemic models were developed in order to study and improve our understanding of these dynamics. By…
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…
The COVID-19 pandemic has shed light on how the spread of infectious diseases worldwide are importantly shaped by both human mobility networks and socio-economic factors. Few studies, however, have examined the interaction of mobility…
We propose a novel data-driven framework for assessing the a-priori epidemic risk of a geographical area and for identifying high-risk areas within a country. Our risk index is evaluated as a function of three different components: the…
The problem of targeted network immunization can be defined as the one of finding a subset of nodes in a network to immunize or vaccinate in order to minimize a tradeoff between the cost of vaccination and the final (stationary) expected…