Related papers: Fundamental limits on taming infectious disease ep…
Epidemics such as COVID-19 pose serious threats to public health and our society, and it is critical to investigate effective methods to control the spread of epidemics over networks. Prior works on epidemic control often assume complete…
Frequent emergence of communicable diseases has been a major concern worldwide. Lack of sufficient resources to mitigate the disease-burden makes the situation even more challenging for lower-income countries. Hence, strategy development…
This article reviews quantitative methods to estimate the basic reproduction number of pandemic influenza, a key threshold quantity to help determine the intensity of interventions required to control the disease. Although it is difficult…
The dynamics of contact networks and epidemics of infectious diseases often occur on comparable time scales. Ignoring one of these time scales may provide an incomplete understanding of the population dynamics of the infection process. We…
The epidemic threshold of a spreading process indicates the condition for the occurrence of the wide spreading regime, thus representing a predictor of the network vulnerability to the epidemic. Such threshold depends on the natural history…
People's cooperation in adopting protective measures is effective in epidemic control and creates herd immunity as a public good. Similarly, the presence of an epidemic is a driving factor for the formation and improvement of cooperation.…
Background: Over the past few decades, numerous forecasting methods have been proposed in the field of epidemic forecasting. Such methods can be classified into different categories such as deterministic vs. probabilistic, comparative…
We introduce a simple multiplicative model to describe the temporal behavior and the ultimate outcome of an epidemic. Our model accounts, in a minimalist way, for the competing influences of imposing public-health restrictions when the…
We study first order necessary conditions for an optimal control problem of a Susceptible-Infected-Recovered (SIR) model with limitations on the duration of the quarantine. The control is done by means of the reproduction number, i.e., the…
Despite centuries of work on containment and mitigation strategies, infectious diseases are still a major problem facing humanity. This work is concerned with simulating heterogeneous contact structures and understanding how the structure…
When considering airborne epidemic spreading in social systems, a natural connection arises between mobility and epidemic contacts. As individuals travel, possibilities to encounter new people either at the final destination or during the…
National responses to the Covid-19 pandemic varied markedly across countries, from business-as-usual to complete shutdowns. Policies aimed at disrupting the viral transmission cycle and preventing the healthcare system from being…
The impact of mitigation or control measures on an epidemics can be estimated by fitting the parameters of a compartmental model to empirical data, and running the model forward with modified parameters that account for a specific measure.…
This paper considers the classical Susceptible--Infected--Susceptible (SIS) network epidemic model, which describes a disease spreading through $n$ nodes, with the network links governing the possible transmission pathways of the disease…
Much traditional statistical modelling assumes that the outcome variables of interest are independent of each other when conditioned on the explanatory variables. This assumption is strongly violated in the case of infectious diseases,…
We study the critical effect of an intermittent social distancing strategy on the propagation of epidemics in adaptive complex networks. We characterize the effect of our strategy in the framework of the susceptible-infected-recovered…
Compartmental models have long served as important tools in mathematical epidemiology, with their usefulness highlighted by the recent COVID-19 pandemic. However, most of the classical models fail to account for certain features of this…
Chronic viral infections can persist in an infected person for decades. From the perspective of the virus, a single infection can span thousands of generations, leading to a highly diverse population of viruses with its own complex…
Epidemics of infectious diseases are an important threat to public health and global economies. Yet, the development of prevention strategies remains a challenging process, as epidemics are non-linear and complex processes. For this reason,…
Estimating the causal effect of a time-varying public health intervention on the course of an infectious disease epidemic is an important methodological challenge. During the COVID-19 pandemic, researchers attempted to estimate the effects…