Related papers: Critical Thresholds in Non-Pharmaceutical Interven…
After the blockade that many nations suffered to stop the growth of the incidence curve of COVID-19 during the first half of 2020, they face the challenge of resuming their social and economic activity. The rapid airborne transmissibility…
A number of models in mathematical epidemiology have been developed to account for control measures such as vaccination or quarantine. However, COVID-19 has brought unprecedented social distancing measures, with a challenge on how to…
Understanding how epidemics spread in a system is a crucial step to prevent and control outbreaks, with broad implications on the system's functioning, health, and associated costs. This can be achieved by identifying the elements at higher…
A number of theoretical models have been developed in recent years modelling epidemic spread in educational settings such as universities to help inform re-opening strategies during the Covid-19 pandemic. However, these studies have had…
The novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) is a highly contagious respiratory disease that was first detected in Wuhan, China in December 2019, and has since spread around the globe, claiming more than 69,000 lives by the time this protocol…
We propose a model predictive control (MPC) approach for minimising the social distancing and quarantine measures during a pandemic while maintaining a hard infection cap. To this end, we study the admissible and the maximal robust…
Testing, contact tracing, and isolation (TTI) is an epidemic management and control approach that is difficult to implement at scale because it relies on manual tracing of contacts. Exposure notification apps have been developed to…
Contact tracing (CT) plays a pivotal role in controlling early epidemic spread, particularly when a novel infectious disease emerges. However, the quantitative impact of missing information -- such as untraced cases or unnotified contacts…
Ever since the first case of the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) was confirmed in Wuhan, China, social distancing has been promoted worldwide, including the United States. It is one of the major community mitigation strategies, also…
The current COVID-19 pandemic highlights the utility of contact tracing, when combined with case isolation and social distancing, as an important tool for mitigating the spread of a disease [1]. Contact tracing provides a mechanism of…
In the absence of any available vaccines or drugs, prevention of the spread of Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic is being achieved by putting many mitigation measures in place. It is indispensable to have robust and reliable ways…
Controlling the spread of COVID-19 - even after a licensed vaccine is available - requires the effective use of non-pharmaceutical interventions: physical distancing, limits on group sizes, mask wearing, etc. To date, such interventions…
The spread of COVID-19 has been thwarted in most countries through non-pharmaceutical interventions. In particular, the most effective measures in this direction have been the stay-at-home and closure strategies of businesses and schools.…
The study of human mobility patterns is a crucially important research field for its impact on several socio-economic aspects and, in particular, the measure of regularity patters of human mobility can provide a across-the-board view of…
A probabilistic approach to the epidemic evolution on realistic social-contact networks allows for characteristic differences among subjects, including the individual number and structure of social contacts, and the heterogeneity of the…
Tracing potentially infected contacts of confirmed cases is important when fighting outbreaks of many infectious diseases. The COVID-19 pandemic has motivated researchers to examine how different contact tracing strategies compare in terms…
Contact tracing is widely considered as an effective procedure in the fight against epidemic diseases. However, one of the challenges for technology based contact tracing is the high number of false positives, questioning its…
We introduce a fundamentally different paradigm for contact tracing: for each positive case, do not only ask direct contacts to quarantine; instead, tell everyone how many relationships away the disease just struck (so, "2" is a close…
Containment, the key strategy in quickly halting an epidemic, requires rapid identification and quarantine of the infected individuals, determination of whom they have had close contact with in the previous days and weeks, and…
The World Health Organisation (WHO) has very strongly recommended testing and isolation as a strategy for controlling the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. The goal of this paper is to quantify the effects of detection and isolation in formal…