Related papers: Optimizing infectious disease mitigation under dyn…
Mathematical models are instrumental to forecast the spread of pathogens and to evaluate the effectiveness of non-pharmaceutical measures. A plethora of optimal strategies has been recently developed to minimize either the infected peak…
We propose a model of the immunity to a cyclical epidemic disease taking account not only of seasonal boosts during the infectious season, but also of residual immunity remaining from one season to the next. The focus is on the exponential…
Our paper investigates distributions of exposed and infectious time periods in an epidemic model and how applying a disease control strategy affects the model's accuracy. While ordinary differential equations are widely used for their…
A key scientific challenge during the outbreak of novel infectious diseases is to predict how the course of the epidemic changes under different countermeasures that limit interaction in the population. Most epidemiological models do not…
Epidemic models play a key role in understanding and responding to the emerging COVID-19 pandemic. Widely used compartmental models are static and are of limited use to evaluate intervention strategies with the emerging pandemic. Applying…
Optimization of vaccine allocations among different segments of a heterogeneous population is important for enhancing the effectiveness of vaccination campaigns in reducing the burden of epidemics. Intuitively, it would seem that…
While several non-pharmacological measures have been implemented for a few months in an effort to slow the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic in the United States, the disease remains a danger in a number of counties as restrictions…
Traditional epidemic models consider that individual processes occur at constant rates. That is, an infected individual has a constant probability per unit time of recovering from infection after contagion. This assumption certainly fails…
Transmission rates in epidemic outbreaks may vary over time depending on the societal response. Non-pharmacological mitigation strategies such as social distancing and the adoption of protective equipment aim precisely at reducing…
We analyze the optimal control of disease prevention and treatment in a basic SIS model. We develop a simple macroeconomic setup in which the social planner determines how to optimally intervene, through income taxation, in order to…
The COVID-19 pandemic has severely affected many aspects of people's daily lives. While many countries are in a re-opening stage, some effects of the pandemic on people's behaviors are expected to last much longer, including how they choose…
Mathematical modelling can help to explain the nature and dynamics of infection transmissions, as well as support a policy for implementing those strategies that are most likely to bring public health and economic benefits. The paper…
There are multiple testing methods to ascertain an infection in an individual and they vary in their performances, cost and delay. Unfortunately, better performing tests are sometimes costlier and time consuming and can only be done for a…
To mitigate the impact of the pandemic, several measures include lockdowns, rapid vaccination programs, school closures, and economic stimulus. These interventions can have positive or unintended negative consequences. Current research to…
In the context of epidemic spreading, many intricate dynamical patterns can emerge due to the cooperation of different types of pathogens or the interaction between the disease spread and other failure propagation mechanism. To unravel such…
We propose a tractable epidemic model that includes containment measures. In the absence of containment measures, the epidemics spread exponentially fast whenever the infectivity rate is positive, $\lambda>0$. The containment measures are…
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…
Mathematical models of infectious disease transmission typically neglect within-host dynamics. Yet within-host dynamics - including pathogen replication, host immune responses, and interactions with microbiota - are crucial not only for…
Epidemic control frequently relies on adjusting interventions based on prevalence. But designing such policies is a highly non-trivial problem due to uncertain intervention effects, costs and the difficulty of quantifying key transmission…
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…