Related papers: On the misuse of time-dependent models in assessin…

Face masks have been widely used as a protective measure against COVID-19. However, pre-pandemic empirical studies have produced mixed statistical results on the effectiveness of masks against respiratory viruses. The implications of the…

Background: Guidelines and recommendations from public health authorities related to face masks have been essential in containing the COVID-19 pandemic. We assessed the prevalence and correlates of mask usage during the pandemic. Methods:…

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 coronavirus pandemic (COVID) has been an exceptional test of current scientific evidence that inform and shape policy. Many US states, cities, and counties implemented public orders for mask use on the notion that this intervention…

Face mask use by the general public for limiting the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic is controversial, though increasingly recommended, and the potential of this intervention is not well understood. We develop a compartmental model for…

We present two models for the COVID-19 pandemic predicting the impact of universal face mask wearing upon the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus--one employing a stochastic dynamic network based compartmental SEIR…

The goal of this work is to consider widespread use of face masks as a non-pharmaceutical control strategy for the Covid-19 pandemic. A SEIR model that divides the population into individuals that wear masks and those that do not is…

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…

The years 2020 and 2021 were characterized by the COVID-19 pandemic. The true impact of the pandemic on populations' health and life still has to be fully discerned. The main objective of this work is to discern the true impact of COVID-19…

In this work, we contribute the first visual open-source empirical study on human behaviour during the COVID-19 pandemic, in order to investigate how compliant a general population is to mask-wearing-related public-health policy.…

Excess mortality, i.e. the difference between expected and observed mortality, is used to quantify the death toll of mortality shocks, such as infectious disease-related epidemics and pandemics. However, predictions of expected mortality…

In spite of a growing body of scientific evidence on the effectiveness of individual face mask usage for reducing transmission rates, individual face mask usage has become a highly polarized topic within the United States. A series of…

At a national-level, we sought to investigate the effect of public masking mandates on COVID-19 in Fall 2020. Specifically, we aimed to evaluate how the relative growth of COVID-19 cases and deaths would have differed if all states had…

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused over 6.4 million registered deaths to date and has had a profound impact on economic activity. Here, we study the interaction of transmission, mortality, and the economy during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic from…

The recent Covid-19 epidemic has lead to comparisons of the countries suffering from it. These are based on the number of excess deaths attributed either directly or indirectly to the epidemic. Unfortunately the data on which such…

Masks are used as part of a comprehensive strategy of measures to limit transmission and save lives during the COVID-19 pandemic. Research about the impact of mask-wearing in the COVID-19 pandemic has raised formidable interest across…

Estimating the true mortality burden of COVID-19 for every country in the world is a difficult, but crucial, public health endeavor. Attributing deaths, direct or indirect, to COVID-19 is problematic. A more attainable target is the "excess…

Quantifying the number of deaths caused by the COVID-19 crisis has been an ongoing challenge for scientists, and no golden standard to do so has yet been established. We propose a principled approach to calculate age-adjusted yearly excess…

This study investigates the impact of masking strategies on time series imputation models in healthcare settings. While current approaches predominantly rely on random masking for model evaluation, this practice fails to capture the…

The effect of masking the general population on a COVID-19 epidemic is estimated by computer simulation using two separate state-of-the-art web-based softwares, one of them calibrated for the SARS-CoV-2 virus. The questions addressed are…