Temporal and probabilistic comparisons of epidemic interventions

DOI10.1007/S11538-023-01220-WMaRDI QIDQ6084619zbMATH OpenOpenAlexFDO

Authors Mariah C. Boudreau, Andrea J. Allen, Nicholas J. Roberts, Antoine Allard, Laurent Hébert-Dufresne

Publication date 6 November 2023

Published in Bulletin of Mathematical Biology (Search for Journal in Brave)

Full work available at URL https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.03210

zbMATH Keywords

branching processdisease modelingforecastingnetworksstochastic process

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Applications of branching processes (60J85) Medical epidemiology (92C60) Epidemiology (92D30)

Abstract: Forecasting disease spread is a critical tool to help public health officials design and plan public health interventions. However, the expected future state of an epidemic is not necessarily well defined as disease spread is inherently stochastic, contact patterns within a population are heterogeneous, and behaviors change. In this work, we use time-dependent probability generating functions (PGFs) to capture these characteristics by modeling a stochastic branching process of the spread of a disease over a network of contacts in which public health interventions are introduced over time. To achieve this, we define a general transmissibility equation to account for varying transmission rates (e.g. masking), recovery rates (e.g. treatment), contact patterns (e.g. social distancing) and percentage of the population immunized (e.g. vaccination). The resulting framework allows for a temporal and probabilistic analysis of an intervention's impact on disease spread, which match continuous-time stochastic simulations that are much more computationally expensive. To aid policy making, we then define several metrics over which temporal and probabilistic intervention forecasts can be compared: Looking at the expected number of cases and the worst-case scenario over time, as well as the probability of reaching a critical level of cases and of not seeing any improvement following an intervention. Given that epidemics do not always follow their average expected trajectories and that the underlying dynamics can change over time, our work paves the way for more detailed short-term forecasts of disease spread and more informed comparison of intervention strategies.

Recommendations

• Calculation of Epidemic First Passage and Peak Time Probability Distributions
• The distribution of the time taken for an epidemic to spread between two communities
• The challenges of modeling and forecasting the spread of COVID-19
• A novel intervention recurrent autoencoder for real time forecasting and non-pharmaceutical intervention selection to curb the spread of Covid-19 in the world

Cites work

• Complex dynamics of synergistic coinfections on realistically clustered networks

Cited in

(4)

• Randomization for the susceptibility effect of an infectious disease intervention
• Optimal Observation Times in Experimental Epidemic Processes
• scientific article; zbMATH DE number 811562 (Why is no real title available?)
• Tracking dynamics of superspreading through contacts, exposures, and transmissions in edge-based network epidemics

This page was built for publication: Temporal and probabilistic comparisons of epidemic interventions

Report a bug (only for logged in users!)Click here to report a bug for this page (MaRDI item Q6084619)