Background Allocation of adequate healthcare facilities is one of the most important factors that public health policy-makers consider when preparing for infectious disease outbreaks. Negative pressure isolation rooms (NPIRs) are one of the critical resources for control of infectious respiratory diseases, such as the novel coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) outbreak. However, there is insuffi...

Over the past few years, emergent threats posed by infectious diseases and bioterrorism have become public health concerns that have increased the need for prompt disease outbreak warnings. In most of the existing disease surveillance systems, disease outbreak risk is assessed by the detection of disease outbreaks. However, this is a retrospective approach that impacts the timeliness of the war...

A revolution in the governance of global infectious disease threats is under way, accelerated by events triggered by the outbreak of SARS in 2003. This review article analyzes pre-SARS trends in the governance of infectious diseases, examines the impact of the SARS outbreak on these trends, and posits that germ governance is now a criterion of "good governance" in world affairs.

Daniel Zeng, Hsinchun Chen, Cecil Lynch, Millicent Eidson, and Ivan Gotham 1 Management Information Systems Department, Eller College of Management, University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona 85721; 2 Division of Medical Informatics, School of Medicine, University of California, Davis, California 95616; also with California Department of Health Services; 3 New York State Department of Health, Alban...

In this paper we first introduce the general stochastic epidemic model for the spread of infectious diseases. Then we give methods for inferring model parameters such as the basic reproduction number R0 and vaccination coverage vc assuming different types of data from an outbreak such as final outbreak details and temporal data or observations from an ongoing outbreak. Both individual heterogen...

Pandemics associated with emerging infectious diseases, particularly zoonotic infections, are increasing in both frequency and impact. Over the past decade, attempts to control deadly zoonotic viruses like severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and Middle Eastern respiratory syndrome (MERS) coronaviruses, and highly pathogenic avian influenza viruses, have been, out of necessity, almost entir...

Department of Infectious Disease Epidemiology, MRC Centre for Outbreak Analysis and Modelling, Faculty of Medicine, Imperial College London, London, UK, Centre for the Mathematical Modelling of Infectious Disease, Infectious Disease Epidemiology Unit, Department of Epidemiology and Population Health, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, London, UK, Department of Infectious Disease Ep...