Related papers: Critical Thresholds in Non-Pharmaceutical Interven…
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…
Global strategies to contain a pandemic, such as social distancing and protective measures, are designed to reduce the overall transmission rate between individuals. Despite such measures, essential institutions, including hospitals,…
Infectious or contagious diseases can be transmitted from one person to another through social contact networks. In today's interconnected global society, such contagion processes can cause global public health hazards, as exemplified by…
The recent COVID-19 pandemic underscores the significance of early-stage non-pharmacological intervention strategies. The widespread use of masks and the systematic implementation of contact tracing strategies provide a potentially equally…
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…
Contact tracing is one of the most important control measures deployed during epidemics. Relying on the identification of contacts of known infected individuals, it necessitates a network perspective. Although pairwise models have been used…
Contact-tracing is an essential tool in order to mitigate the impact of pandemic such as the COVID-19. In order to achieve efficient and scalable contact-tracing in real time, digital devices can play an important role. While a lot of…
Non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) are crucial for controlling pandemics, but existing research often overlooks the heterogeneity of individual behavior, which can lead to inaccurate evaluations of the effectiveness of strategies. In…
Metapopulation epidemic models describe epidemic dynamics in networks of spatially distant patches connected with pathways for migration of individuals. In the present study, we deal with a susceptible-infected-recovered (SIR)…
Contact tracing has been extensively studied from different perspectives in recent years. However, there is no clear indication of why this intervention has proven effective in some epidemics (SARS) and mostly ineffective in some others…
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…
A generalization of the standard susceptible-infectious-removed (SIR) stochastic model for epidemics in sparse random networks is introduced which incorporates contact tracing in addition to random screening. We propose a deterministic…
Different countries -- and sometimes different regions within the same countries -- have adopted different strategies in trying to contain the ongoing COVID-19 epidemic; these mix in variable parts social confinement, early detection and…
We study the relative importance of two key control measures for epidemic spreading: endogenous social self-distancing and exogenous imposed quarantine. We use the framework of adaptive networks, moment-closure, and ordinary differential…
The ability to directly record human face-to-face interactions increasingly enables the development of detailed data-driven models for the spread of directly transmitted infectious diseases at the scale of individuals. Complete coverage of…
COVID-19 remains a challenging global threat with ongoing waves of infections and clinical disease which have resulted millions of deaths and an enormous strain on health systems worldwide. Effective vaccines have been developed for the…
In this paper we make the first steps to bridge the gap between classic control theory and modern, network-based epidemic models. In particular, we apply nonlinear model predictive control (NMPC) to a pairwise ODE model which we use to…
The COVID-19 infection cases have surged globally, causing devastations to both the society and economy. A key factor contributing to the sustained spreading is the presence of a large number of asymptomatic or hidden spreaders, who mix…
High impact epidemics constitute one of the largest threats humanity is facing in the 21st century. Testing, contact tracing and quarantining are critical in slowing down epidemic dynamics, but may prove insufficient for highly contagious…
We study the effects of switching social contacts as a strategy to control epidemic outbreaks. Connections between susceptible and infective individuals can be broken by either individual, and then reconnected to a randomly chosen member of…