We proposed a Monte-Carlo method to estimate temporal reproduction number without complete information about symptom onsets of all cases. Province-level analysis demonstrated the huge success of Chinese control measures on COVID-19, that is, provinces' reproduction numbers quickly decrease to <1 by just one week after taking actions.
The virus SARS-COV-2 caused disease COVID-19 has been declared a pandemic by WHO. Currently, over 210 countries and territories have been affected. Careful, well-designed drugs and vaccine for the total elimination of this virus seem to be the need of the hour. In this context, the invivo mathematical modelling studies can be extremely helpful in understanding the efficacy of the drug interventions. These studies can also help understand the role of the crucial inflammatory mediators and the behaviour of immune response towards this novel coronavirus. Motivated by these facts, in this paper, w…
Control Intervention Strategies for Within-Host, Between-Host and their Efficacy in the Treatment, Spread of COVID-19 : A Multi Scale Modeling Approach
Since the end of 2019, COVID-19 has significantly affected the lives of people around the world. Towards the end of 2020, several COVID-19 vaccine candidates with relatively high efficacy have been reported in the final phase of clinical trials. Vaccines have been considered as critical tools for opening up social and economic activities, thereby lessening the impact of this disease on the society. This paper presents a simulation of COVID-19 spread using modified Susceptible-Infected-Removed (SIR) model under vaccine intervention in several localities of Malaysia, i.e. those cities or states …
Contagious respiratory diseases, such as COVID-19, depend on sufficiently prolonged exposures for the successful transmission of the underlying pathogen. It is important for organizations to evaluate the efficacy of interventions aiming at mitigating viral transmission among their personnel. We have developed a operational risk assessment simulation framework that couples a spatial agent-based model of movement with a SIR epidemiological model to assess the relative risks of different intervention strategies. By applying our model on MIT's STATA building, we assess the impacts of three possibl…
Based on the information communicated in press releases, and finally published towards the end of 2020 by Pfizer, Moderna and AstraZeneca, we have built up a simple Bayesian model, in which the main quantity of interest plays the role of {\em vaccine efficacy} (`$ε$'). The resulting Bayesian Network is processed by a Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC), implemented in JAGS interfaced to R via rjags. As outcome, we get several probability density functions (pdf's) of $ε$, each conditioned on the data provided by the three pharma companies. The result is rather stable against large variations of the…
With the present highly infectious dominant SARS-CoV-2 strain of B1.1.529 or Omicron spreading around the globe, there is concern that the COVID-19 pandemic will not end soon and that it will be a race against time until a more contagious and virulent variant emerges. One of the most promising approaches for preventing virus propagation is to maintain continuous high vaccination efficacy among the population, thereby strengthening the population protective effect and preventing the majority of infection in the vaccinated population, as is known to occur with the Omicron variant frequently. Cou…
A novel Coronavirus pandemic emerged in December of 2019, causing devastating public health impact across the world. In the absence of a safe and effective vaccine or antiviral, strategies for mitigating the burden of the pandemic are focused on non-pharmaceutical interventions, such as social-distancing, contact-tracing, quarantine, isolation and the use of face-masks in public. We develop a new mathematical model for assessing the population-level impact of these mitigation strategies. Simulations of the model, using data relevant to COVID-19 transmission in New York state and the entire US,…
We study mechanisms for reopening economic activities that explore the trade off between containing the spread of COVID-19 and maximizing economic impact. This is of current importance as many organizations, cities, and states are formulating reopening strategies. Our mechanisms, referred to as group scheduling, are based on partitioning the population into groups and scheduling each group on appropriate days with possible gaps (when all are quarantined). Each group interacts with no other group and, importantly, any person who is symptomatic in a group is quarantined. Specifically, our mechan…
India is one of the worst affected countries by the Covid-19 pandemic at present. We studied publicly available data of the Covid-19 patients in India and analyzed possible impacts of quarantine and social distancing within the stochastic framework of the SEQIR model to illustrate the controlling strategy of the pandemic. Our simulation results clearly show that proper quarantine and social distancing should be maintained from an early time just at the start of the pandemic and should be continued till its end to effectively control the pandemic. This calls for a more socially disciplined life…
COVID-19 in low-tolerance border quarantine systems: impact of the Delta variant of SARS-CoV-2
The University of Melbourne(墨尔本大学);Melbourne School of Population and Global Health, The University of Melbourne(墨尔本大学人口与全球健康学院);The Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity, The Royal Melbourne Hospital and The University of Melbourne(彼得·多赫蒂感染与免疫研究所、皇家墨尔本医院和墨尔本大学);Department of Infectious Diseases, The Alfred and Central Clinical School, Monash University(莫纳什大学阿尔弗雷德医院和中央临床学院传染病系);School of Mathematics and Statistics, The University of Melbourne(墨尔本大学数学与统计学院)
Widespread growth signatures in COVID-19 confirmed case counts are reported, with sharp transitions between three distinct dynamical regimes (exponential, superlinear and sublinear). Through analytical and numerical analysis, a novel framework is developed that exploits information in these signatures. An approach well known to physics is applied, where one looks for common dynamical features, independently from differences in other factors. These features and associated scaling laws are used as a powerful tool to pinpoint regions where analytical derivations are effective, get an insight into…
We have developed a globally applicable diagnostic Covid-19 model by augmenting the classical SIR epidemiological model with a neural network module. Our model does not rely upon previous epidemics like SARS/MERS and all parameters are optimized via machine learning algorithms employed on publicly available Covid-19 data. The model decomposes the contributions to the infection timeseries to analyze and compare the role of quarantine control policies employed in highly affected regions of Europe, North America, South America and Asia in controlling the spread of the virus. For all continents co…
The COVID-19 pandemic has posed a policy making crisis where efforts to slow down or end the pandemic conflict with economic priorities. This paper provides mathematical analysis of optimal disease control policies with idealized compartmental models for disease propagation and simplistic models of social and economic costs. Two locally optimal control strategies are found and categorized as `suppression' and `mitigation' strategies. We analyze how these strategies change when we incorporate vaccination into the model and find a new optimal `delay-mitigation' strategy.
Universidad de Sevilla(塞维利亚大学);Universidad Loyola Andalucía(安达卢西亚洛约拉大学)
This document analyzes the role of data-driven methodologies in Covid-19 pandemic. We provide a SWOT analysis and a roadmap that goes from the access to data sources to the final decision-making step. We aim to review the available methodologies while anticipating the difficulties and challenges in the development of data-driven strategies to combat the Covid-19 pandemic. A 3M-analysis is presented: Monitoring, Modelling and Making decisions. The focus is on the potential of well-known datadriven schemes to address different challenges raised by the pandemic: i) monitoring and forecasting the …
The goal of this work is to study the optimal controls for the COVID-19 epidemic in Brazil. We consider an age-structured SEIRQ model with quarantine compartment, where the controls are the quarantine entrance parameters. We then compare the optimal controls for different quarantine lengths and distribution of the total control cost by assessing their respective reductions in deaths in comparison to the same period without quarantine. The best strategy provides a calendar of when to relax the isolation measures for each age group. Finally, we analyse how a delay in the beginning of the quarant…
We develop and analyze in this work an epidemiological model for COVID-19 using Tunisian data. Our aims are first to evaluate Tunisian control policies for COVID-19 and secondly to understand the effect of different screening, quarantine and containment strategies and the rule of the asymptomatic patients on the spread of the virus in the Tunisian population. With this work, we show that Tunisian control policies are efficient in screening infected and asymptomatic individuals and that if containment and curfew are maintained the epidemic will be quickly contained.
In this study, we formulate a mathematical model incorporating age specific transmission dynamics of COVID-19 to evaluate the role of vaccination and treatment strategies in reducing the size of COVID-19 burden. Initially, we establish the positivity and boundedness of the solutions of the model and calculate the basic reproduction number. We then formulate an optimal control problem with vaccination and treatment as control variables. Optimal vaccination and treatment policies are analysed for different values of the weight constant associated with the cost of vaccination and different transm…
This paper presents the assessment of time-dependent national-level restrictions and control actions and their effects in fighting the COVID-19 pandemic. By analysing the transmission dynamics during the first wave of COVID-19 in the country, the effectiveness of the various levels of control actions taken to flatten the curve can be better quantified and understood. This in turn can help the relevant authorities to better plan for and control the subsequent waves of the pandemic. To achieve this, a deterministic population model for the pandemic is firstly developed to take into consideration…
COVID-19--a viral infectious disease--has quickly emerged as a global pandemic infecting millions of people with a significant number of deaths across the globe. The symptoms of this disease vary widely. Depending on the symptoms an infected person is broadly classified into two categories namely, asymptomatic and symptomatic. Asymptomatic individuals display mild or no symptoms but continue to transmit the infection to otherwise healthy individuals. This particular aspect of asymptomatic infection poses a major obstacle in managing and controlling the transmission of the infectious disease. I…
The goal of this work is to analyse the effects of control policies for the coronavirus (COVID-19) epidemic in Brazil. This is done by considering an age-structured SEIR model with a quarantine class and two types of controls. The first one studies the sensitivity with regard to the parameters of the basic reproductive number R0 which is calculated by the next generation method. The second one evaluates different quarantine strategies by comparing their relative total number of deaths.
This study aims to determine an optimal control strategy for vaccine scheduling in COVID-19 pandemic treatment by converting widely acknowledged infectious disease model named SEIR into an optimal control problem. The problem is augmented by adding medication and vaccine limitations to match real-world situations. Two version of the problem is formulated to minimize the number of infected individuals at the same provide the optimal vaccine possible to reduce the susceptible population to a considerably lower state. Optimal control problems are solved using RBF-Galerkin method. These problems a…
We propose a novel testing and containment strategy in order to contain the spread of SARS-CoV2 while permitting large parts of the population to resume social and economic activity. Our approach recognises the fact that testing capacities are severely constrained in many countries. In this setting, we show that finding the best way to utilise this limited number of tests during a pandemic can be formulated concisely as an allocation problem. Our problem formulation takes into account the heterogeneity of the population and uses pooled testing to identify and isolate individuals while prioriti…
Nowadays, the epidemic of COVID-19 in China is under control. However, the epidemic are developing rapidly around the world. Due to the normal migration of population, China is facing high risk from imported cases. The potential specific medicine and vaccine is still in the process of clinical trials. Currently, controlling the impact of imported cases is the key to prevent new outbreak of COVID-19 in China. In this paper, we propose two impulsive systems to describe the impact of multilateral imported cases of COVID-19. Based on the published data, we simulate and discussed the epidemic trend…
The outbreak of COVID-19 caused by SARS-CoV-2 in Wuhan and other cities in China in 2019 has become a global pandemic as declared by World Health Organization (WHO) in the first quarter of 2020 . The delay in diagnosis, limited hospital resources and other treatment resources leads to rapid spread of COVID-19. In this article, we consider an optimal control COVID-19 transmission model and assess the impact of some control measures that can lead to the reduction of exposed and infectious individuals in the population. We investigate three control strategies for this deadly infectious disease us…
With a two-layer contact-dispersion model and data in China, we analyze the cost-effectiveness of three types of antiepidemic measures for COVID-19: regular epidemiological control, local social interaction control, and inter-city travel restriction. We find that: 1) intercity travel restriction has minimal or even negative effect compared to the other two at the national level; 2) the time of reaching turning point is independent of the current number of cases, and only related to the enforcement stringency of epidemiological control and social interaction control measures; 3) strong enforcem…
In this study, we present a new epidemiological model, with contamination from confirmed and unreported. We also compute equilibria and study their stability without intervention strategies. Optimal control theory has proven to be a successful tool in understanding ways to curtail the spread of infectious diseases by devising the optimal disease intervention strategies. We investigate the impact of distancing, case finding, and case holding controls while at the same time, we minimize the number of infected and dead individuals. The method consists of minimizing the cost functional related to …
This manuscript proposes a model of $n$ distinct populations interaction structured SEIR to describe the spread of COVID-19 pandemic diseases. The proposed model has the flexibility to include geographically separated communities as well as taking into account aging population groups and their interactions. We show that distinct assumptions on the dynamics of the proposed model lead to a plateau-like curve of the infected population, reflecting collected data from large countries like Brazil. Such observations aim to the following conjecture: " Covid-19 diseased diffusion from the capitals to …
We develop a mathematical model for transferring the vaccine BNT162b2 based on the heat diffusion equation. Then, we apply optimal control theory to the proposed generalized SEIR model. We introduce vaccination for the susceptible population to control the spread of the COVID-19 epidemic. For this, we use the Pontryagin minimum principle to find the necessary optimality conditions for the optimal control. The optimal control problem and the heat diffusion equation are solved numerically. Finally, several simulations are done to study and predict the spread of the COVID-19 epidemic in Italy. In…
Ever since the outbreak of the COVID-19 epidemic, various public health control strategies have been proposed and tested against the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2. We study three specific COVID-19 epidemic control models: the susceptible, exposed, infectious, recovered (SEIR) model with vaccination control; the SEIR model with shield immunity control; and the susceptible, un-quarantined infected, quarantined infected, confirmed infected (SUQC) model with quarantine control. We express the control requirement in metric temporal logic (MTL) formulas (a type of formal specification languages) which can …
We consider the control of the COVID-19 pandemic through a standard SIR compartmental model. This control is induced by the aggregation of individuals' decisions to limit their social interactions: when the epidemic is ongoing, an individual can diminish his/her contact rate in order to avoid getting infected, but this effort comes at a social cost. If each individual lowers his/her contact rate, the epidemic vanishes faster, but the effort cost may be high. A Mean Field Nash equilibrium at the population level is formed, resulting in a lower effective transmission rate of the virus. We prove …
This paper studies if and to which extent COVID-19 epidemics can be controlled by authorities taking decisions on public health measures on the basis of daily reports of swab test results, active cases and total cases. A suitably simplified process model is derived to support the controllability analysis, highlighting the presence of very significant time delay; the model is validated with data from several outbreaks. The analysis shows that suppression strategies can be effective if strong enough and enacted early on. It also shows how mitigation strategies can fail because of the combination…
A fractional-order compartmental model was recently used to describe real data of the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in Portugal [Chaos Solitons Fractals 144 (2021), Art. 110652]. Here, we modify that model in order to correct time dimensions and use it to investigate the third wave of COVID-19 that occurred in Portugal from December 2020 to February 2021, and that has surpassed all previous waves, both in number and consequences. A new fractional optimal control problem is then formulated and solved, with vaccination and preventive measures as controls. A cost-effectiveness analysis is c…
The COVID-19 pandemic is the profoundest health crisis of the 21rst century. The SARS-CoV-2 virus arrived in Brazil around March, 2020 and its social and economical backlashes are catastrophic. In this paper, it is investigated how Model Predictive Control (MPC) could be used to plan appropriate social distancing policies to mitigate the pandemic effects in Bahia and Santa Catarina, two states of different regions, culture, and population demography in Brazil. In addition, the parameters of Susceptible-Infected-Recovered-Deceased (SIRD) models for these two states are identified using an optim…
In this paper, we propose a dynamical model to describe the transmission of COVID-19, which is spreading in China and many other countries. To avoid a larger outbreak in the worldwide, Chinese government carried out a series of strong strategies to prevent the situation from deteriorating. Home quarantine is the most important one to prevent the spread of COVID-19. In order to estimate the effect of population quarantine, we divide the population into seven categories for simulation. Based on a Least-Squares procedure and officially published data, the estimation of parameters for the proposed…
The main focus of this chapter is on public health control strategies which are currently the main way to mitigate COVID-19 pandemic. We introduce and compare compartmental models of increasing complexity for COVID-19 transmission to describe dynamics of the disease spread. We begin by considering an SEAIR model including basic characteristics related to COVID-19. Next, we shall pay attention to age-structure modeling to emphasis the role of age-group individuals on the disease spread. A Model with constant delay is also formulated to show the impact of the latency period on the severity of CO…
The SEIR model is a compartmental model used to simulate the dynamics of an epidemic. In this chapter, we introduce two control functions in the compartmental SEIR model representing vaccination and plasma transfusion. Optimal control problems are proposed to study the effects of these two control measures, on the reduction of infected individuals and increase of recovered ones, with minimal costs. Up to our knowledge, the plasma transfusion treatment has never been considered as a control strategy for epidemics mitigation. The proposed vaccination and treatment strategies may have a real appl…
We apply optimal control theory to a generalized SEIR-type model. The proposed system has three controls, representing social distancing, preventive means, and treatment measures to combat the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic. We analyze such optimal control problem with respect to real data transmission in Italy. Our results show the appropriateness of the model, in particular with respect to the number of quarantined/hospitalized (confirmed and infected) and recovered individuals. Considering the Pontryagin controls, we show how in a perfect world one could have drastically diminish the numbe…
The World Health Organization (WHO) made the assessment that COVID-19 can be characterized as a pandemic on March 11, 2020. To the COVID-19 outbreak, there is no vaccination and no treatment. The only way to control the COVID-19 outbreak is sustained physical distancing. In this work, a simple control law was proposed to keep the infected individuals during the COVID-19 outbreak below the desired number. The proposed control law keeps the value of infected individuals controlled only adjusting the social distancing level. The stability analysis of the proposed control law is done and the uncer…
It is well established that people with diabetes are more likely to have serious complications from COVID-19. Nearly 1 in 5 COVID-19 deaths in the African region are linked to diabetes. World Health Organization (WHO) finds that 18.3% of COVID-19 deaths in Africa are among people with diabetes. In this paper, we have formulated and analysed a mathematical comorbidity model of diabetes - COVID-19 of the deterministic type. The basic properties of the model were explored. The basic reproductive number, equilibrium points and stability of the equilibrium points were examined. Sensitivity analysis…
Almost every country in the world is battling to limit the spread of COVID-19. As the world strives to get an effective medication to control the disease, appropriate intervention measures, for now, remains one of the effective methods to reduce the spread of the disease. Optimal control strategies have proven to be an effective method in curtailing the spread of infectious diseases. In this paper, a model has been formulated to study transmission dynamics of the disease. Basic properties of the model such as the basic reproduction number, equilibrium points and stability of the equilibrium po…
We investigate, through a fractional mathematical model, the effects of physical distance on the SARS-CoV-2 virus transmission. Two controls are considered in our model for eradication of the spread of COVID-19: media education, through campaigns explaining the importance of social distancing, use of face masks, etc., towards all population, while the second one is quarantine social isolation of the exposed individuals. A general fractional order optimal control problem, and associated optimality conditions of Pontryagin type, are discussed, with the goal to minimize the number of susceptible …
There is a continuing debate on relative benefits of various mitigation and suppression strategies aimed to control the spread of COVID-19. Here we report the results of agent-based modelling using a fine-grained computational simulation of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic in Australia. This model is calibrated to match key characteristics of COVID-19 transmission. An important calibration outcome is the age-dependent fraction of symptomatic cases, with this fraction for children found to be one-fifth of such fraction for adults. We apply the model to compare several intervention strategies, incl…
Background: By the beginning of December 2020, some vaccines against COVID-19 already presented efficacy and security, which qualify them to be used in mass vaccination campaigns. Thus, setting up strategies of vaccination became crucial to control the COVID19 pandemic. Methods: We use daily COVID-19 reports from Chicago and NYC from 01-Mar2020 to 28- Nov-2020 to estimate the parameters of an SEIR-like epidemiological model that accounts for different severity levels. To achieve data adherent predictions, we let the model parameters to be time-dependent. The model is used to forecast different…
During decades, mathematical models have been used to predict the behavior of physical and biologic systems, and to define strategies aiming the minimization of the effects regarding different types of diseases. In the present days, the development of mathematical models to simulate the dynamic behavior of novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) is considered an important theme due to the quantity of infected people worldwide. In this work, the aim is to determine an optimal control strategy for vaccine administration in COVID-19 pandemic treatment considering real data from China. For this purpo…
Early assessments of the spreading rate of COVID-19 were subject to significant uncertainty, as expected with limited data and difficulties in case ascertainment, but more reliable inferences can now be made. Here, we estimate from European data that COVID-19 cases are expected to double initially every three days, until social distancing interventions slow this growth, and that the impact of such measures is typically only seen nine days - i.e. three doubling times - after their implementation. We argue that such temporal patterns are more critical than precise estimates of the basic reproduc…
This article considers the optimal control of the SIR model with both transmission and treatment uncertainty. It follows the model presented in Gatto and Schellhorn (2021). We make four significant improvements on the latter paper. First, we prove the existence of a solution to the model. Second, our interpretation of the control is more realistic: while in Gatto and Schellhorn the control $α$ is the proportion of the population that takes a basic dose of treatment, so that $α>1$ occurs only if some patients take more than a basic dose, in our paper, $α$ is constrained between zero and one, an…
Social distancing and lockdown are the two main non-pharmaceutical interventions being used by the UK government to contain and control the COVID-19 epidemic; these are being applied uniformly across the entire country, even though the results of the Imperial College report by Ferguson et al show that the impact of the infection increases sharply with age. This paper develops a variant of the workhorse SIR model for epidemics, where the population is classified into a number of age groups. This allows us to understand the effects of age-dependent controls on the epidemic, and explore possible …
Zhang et al. (2020) used linear regression to quantify the effect of lockdowns on the number of cases of COVID-19. We show using differential equations from the susceptible-exposed-infected-recovered (SEIR) model and with an example from another location not previously considered that the Zhang et al. analysis should not be considered sound evidence that mask mandates are sufficient to control or the primary factor controlling the spread of COVID-19.
The novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 and resulting COVID-19 disease have had an unprecedented spread and continue to cause an increasing number of fatalities worldwide. While vaccines are still under development, social distancing, extensive testing, and quarantining of confirmed infected subjects remain the most effective measures to contain the pandemic. These measures carry a significant socioeconomic cost. In this work, we introduce a novel optimization-based decision-making framework for managing the COVID-19 outbreak in the US. This includes modeling the dynamics of affected populations, est…
We demonstrate an approach to replicate and forecast the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) pandemic using the toolkit of probabilistic programming languages (PPLs). Our goal is to study the impact of various modeling assumptions and motivate policy interventions enacted to limit the spread of infectious diseases. Using existing compartmental models we show how to use inference in PPLs to obtain posterior estimates for disease parameters. We improve popular existing models to reflect practical considerations such as the under-reporting of the true number of COVID-19 cases and motivate the nee…
A reasonable prediction of infectious diseases transmission process under different disease control strategies is an important reference point for policy makers. Here we established a dynamic transmission model via Python and realized comprehensive regulation of disease control measures. We classified government interventions into three categories and introduced three parameters as descriptions for the key points in disease control, these being intraregional growth rate, interregional communication rate, and detection rate of infectors. Our simulation predicts the infection by COVID-19 in the …
At the time of writing, the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), had already resulted in more than thirty-two million cases infected and more than one million deaths worldwide. Given the fact that the pandemic is still threatening health and safety, it is in the urgency to understand the COVID-19 contagion process and know how it might be controlled. With this motivation in mind, in this paper, we consider a version of a stochastic discrete-time Susceptible-Infected-Recovered-Death~(SIRD)-based epidemiological model with two uncerta…
Imported COVID-19 cases, if unchecked, can jeopardize the effort of domestic containment. We aim to find out what sustainable border control options for different entities (e.g., countries, states) exist during the reopening phases, given their own choice of domestic control measures and new technologies such as contact tracing. We propose a SUIHR model, which represents an extension to the discrete time SIR models. The model focuses on studying the spreading of virus predominantly by asymptomatic and pre-symptomatic patients. Imported risk and (1-tier) contact tracing are both built into the …
Strong social distancing restrictions have been crucial to controlling the COVID-19 outbreak thus far, and the next question is when and how to relax these restrictions. A sequential timing of relaxing restrictions across groups is explored in order to identify policies that simultaneously reduce health risks and economic stagnation relative to current policies. The goal will be to mitigate health risks, particularly among the most fragile sub-populations, while also managing the deleterious effect of restrictions on economic activity. The results of this paper show that a properly constructed…
Successful predictive modeling of epidemics requires an understanding of the implicit feedback control strategies which are implemented by populations to modulate the spread of contagion. While this task of capturing endogenous behavior can be achieved through intricate modeling assumptions, we find that a population's reaction to case counts can be described through a second order affine dynamical system with linear control which fits well to the data across different regions and times throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. The model fits the data well both in and out of sample across the 50 state…