Related papers: Slovakia's Mass Testing: A Critical Look at the Ne…
Pavelka et al. (Science, Reports, 7 May 2021) claim that a single round of population-wide antigen testing in Slovakia reduced the observed COVID-19 prevalence by 58%, and that it played a substantial role in curbing the pandemic. We argue…
Mina and Andersen, authors of the Perspectives in Science: COVID-19 Testing: One Size Does Not Fit All have referred to results and adopted conclusions from recently published governmental report Pavelka et al. "The effectiveness of…
Mass antigen testing has been proposed as a possible cost-effective tool to contain the Covid-19 pandemic. We test the impact of a voluntary mass testing campaign implemented in the Italian region of South Tyrol on the spread of the virus…
The effectiveness of face masks as a population level intervention against respiratory viral transmission remains contested. While a large observational literature published during the COVID-19 pandemic reported beneficial effects,…
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…
Large-scale testing is considered key to assess the state of the current COVID-19 pandemic. Yet, the link between the reported case numbers and the true state of the pandemic remains elusive. We develop mathematical models based on…
Elections are crucial for legitimating modern democracies, and giving all candidates the possibility to run a proper electoral campaign is necessary for elections' success in providing such legitimization. Yet, during a pandemic, the risk…
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…
We study the impact on the epidemiological dynamics of a class of restrictive measures that are aimed at reducing the number of contacts of individuals who have a higher risk of being infected with a transmittable disease. Such measures are…
The rapid spread of the new SARS-CoV-2 virus triggered a global health crisis disproportionately impacting people with pre-existing health conditions and particular demographic and socioeconomic characteristics. One of the main concerns of…
This article is a reproduction of a Fraunhofer ITWM report from 28 June 2021 on the contribution of various non-pharmaceutical measures in breaking the 3rd Corona wave in Germany. The main finding is that testing contributed more to the…
This paper discusses some statistical aspects of the U.K. Covid-19 pandemic response, focussing particularly on cases where we believe that a statistically questionable approach or presentation has had a substantial impact on public…
During the last years, statistical physics has received an increasing attention as a framework for the analysis of real complex systems; yet, this is less clear in the case of international political events, partly due to the complexity in…
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.…
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…
Mobility data at EU scale can help understand the dynamics of the pandemic and possibly limit the impact of future waves. Still, since a reliable and consistent method to measure the evolution of contagion at international level is missing,…
We analyze the methodological approach and validity of interpretation of using national-level time-series regression analyses relating epidemic outcomes to policies that estimate many models involving permutations of analytic choices (i.e.,…
Societal stress may cause far reaching political, economic and even geological effects. Nevertheless, it is still scarcely investigated, contrary to social stress, which an individual faces in their interactions within a society. It is…
In order to slow the spread of the CoViD-19 pandemic, governments around the world have enacted a wide set of policies limiting the transmission of the disease. Initially, these focused on non-pharmaceutical interventions; more recently,…
During the COVID-19 pandemic, governments faced the challenge of managing population behavior to prevent their healthcare systems from collapsing. Sweden adopted a strategy centered on voluntary sanitary recommendations while Belgium…