Controlling Epidemic Spread: Reducing Economic Losses with Targeted Closures

Reducing Endophyte-related Economic Losses

Tall fescue is native to Europe and was rarely planted in the United States until after the first four decades of the 20 century. However, since the release of the variety ‘Kentucky 31’ in 1943, this versatile cool season perennial grass has been widely planted for forage, turf, and conservation purposes, with most of the acreage planted consisting of this variety. “Fescue” has many attributes ...

Title: Controlling Epidemic Spread by Social Distancing: Do It Well or Not at All

Controlling epidemic spread by social distancing: Do it well or not at all

BACKGROUND Existing epidemiological models have largely tended to neglect the impact of individual behaviour on the dynamics of diseases. However, awareness of the presence of illness can cause people to change their behaviour by, for example, staying at home and avoiding social contacts. Such changes can be used to control epidemics but they exact an economic cost. Our aim is to study the cost...

Epidemic Spread on Weighted Networks

The contact structure between hosts shapes disease spread. Most network-based models used in epidemiology tend to ignore heterogeneity in the weighting of contacts between two individuals. However, this assumption is known to be at odds with the data for many networks (e.g. sexual contact networks) and to have a critical influence on epidemics' behavior. One of the reasons why models usually ig...

Approximation Algorithms for Reducing the Spectral Radius to Control Epidemic Spread

The largest eigenvalue of the adjacency matrix of a network (referred to as the spectral radius) is an important metric in its own right. Further, for several models of epidemic spread on networks (e.g., the ‘flu-like’ SIS model), it has been shown that an epidemic dies out quickly if the spectral radius of the graph is below a certain threshold that depends on the model parameters. This motiva...