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The outbreak of coronavirus and the infectious disease it causes (COVID-19) have taken different paths around the world, with countries experiencing different rates of infection, case prevalence and mortality.

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31–40 of 334 results

Journal Article 27 April 2021

Road to recovery: Managing an epidemic

Loertscher, Simon, Muir, Ellen V

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Without widespread immunization, the road to recovery from the current COVID-19 lockdowns will optimally follow a path that finds the difficult balance between the social and economic benefits of liberty and the toll from the disease. We provide an approach that combines epidemiology and economic models, taking as given that the maximum capacity of the healthcare system imposes a constraint that must not be exceeded. Treating the transmission rate as a decreasing function of the severity of the lockdown, we first determine the minimal lockdown that satisfies this constraint using an epidemiology model with a homogeneous population to predict future demand for healthcare. Allowing for a heterogeneous population, we then derive the optimal lockdown policy under the assumption of homogeneous mixing and show that it is characterized by a bang-bang solution. Possibilities such as the...
Journal Article 27 April 2021

Promoting Graduate Student Mental Health During COVID-19: Acceptability, Feasibility, and Perceived Utility of an Online Single-Session Intervention

Wasil, Akash R, Taylor, Madison E, Franzen, Rose E, Steinberg, Joshua S, DeRubeis, Robert J

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IntroductionIn addition to the serious physical health consequences of COVID-19, the resulting societal changes have had major impacts on population-wide mental health (Liu et al., 2020). COVID-19 has introduced a variety of stressors into modern life, including fears about contracting the virus, concern for loved ones, economic instability, social distancing, and other major lifestyle disruptions (Pfefferbaum and North, 2020). Many of these concerns have affected graduate and professional students (i.e., students earning advanced degrees, as well as non-traditional and non-degree seeking students). Even before the crisis, students were vulnerable to depression, anxiety, loneliness, and suicidal ideation (Evans et al., 2018). The COVID-19 crisis has exacerbated these concerns: many universities have ceased non-essential operations, mandated that students leave campus, and shut...
Preprint 27 April 2021

Effective vaccine allocation strategies, balancing economy with infection control against COVID-19 in Japan

Sunohara, Satoshi, Asakura, Toshiaki, Kimura, Takashi, Ozawa, Shun, Oshima, Satoshi, Yamauchi, Daigo, Tamakoshi, Akiko

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Abstract Due to COVID-19, many countries including Japan have implemented a suspension of economic activities for infection control. It has contributed to reduce the transmission of COVID-19 but caused severe economic losses. Today, several promising vaccines have been developed and are already being distributed in some countries. Therefore, we evaluated various vaccine and intensive countermeasure strategies with constraint of economic loss using SEIR model to obtain knowledge of how to balance economy with infection control in Japan. Our main result is that the vaccination strategy that prioritizes younger generation outperformed the other strategies in terms of deaths. On the other hand, when we focused on strategies that prioritize older generation, as Japan has decided to do, the optimal vaccination strategy was determined by the basic reproduction number and acceptable...
Preprint 26 April 2021

Income Losses and Subjective Well-Being: Gender and Ethnic Inequalities during the Covid-19 Lockdown Period in the UK

Giovanis, Eleftherios

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COVID-19 has become a global health pandemic forcing governments introducing unprecedented steps to contain the spread of the virus. On the 23rd of March, 2020, the UK government addressed the nation to announce extraordinary measures as a response to slow down the spread of the coronavirus, which have influenced the well-being and finances of millions of people. As a result people had to make difficult adjustments and to follow different coping strategies in order to respond to income losses. The main objective of this study is to examine the impact of various coping strategies, due to the lockdown measures, on the respondents’ subjective well-being by gender and ethnic background. We apply a difference-in-differences framework using data from the UK Household Longitudinal Study (UKHLS) combined with the UKHLS COVID-19 survey conducted in April 2020. Furthermore, using the Life...
Journal Article 25 April 2021

Costs associated with COVID-19 in healthcare personnel in Greece: a cost-of-illness analysis

Maltezou, H C, Giannouchos, T V, Pavli, A, Tsonou, P, Dedoukou, X, Tseroni, M, Papadima, K, Hatzigeorgiou, D, Sipsas, N V, Souliotis, K

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Healthcare personnel (HCP) are at increased risk of infection with severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2), the aetiological agent of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). To estimate the costs related to SARS-CoV-2 exposure and infection among HCP in Greece. Data were retrieved from the national database of SARS-CoV-2 infections and from the database of HCP exposed to patients with COVID-19. A cost-of-illness analysis was performed to estimate total, direct and indirect costs. In total, 254 HCP with COVID-19 and 3332 HCP exposed to patients with COVID-19 during the first epidemic wave were studied. Of the 254 HCP with COVID-19, 49 (19.3%) were hospitalized (mean length of hospitalization 11.6 days) and four were admitted to intensive care units (mean duration 10.8 days). Overall, 1332 (40%) exposed HCP had a mean duration of absenteeism of 7.5 days, and 252...
Preprint 22 April 2021

Economy Versus Disease Spread: Reopening Mechanisms for COVID 19

Augustine, John, Hourani, Khalid, Molla, Anisur Rahaman, Pandurangan, Gopal, Pasic, Adi

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    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 mechanisms are characterized by three parameters $(g,d,t)$, where $g$ is the number of groups, $d$ is the number of days a group is continuously scheduled, and $t$ is the gap between cycles. We show that our mechanisms effectively trade off economic activity for more effective control of the...
Preprint 19 April 2021

Cost Effective Reproduction Number Based Strategies for Reducing Deaths from COVID-19

Thron, Chris, Mbazumutima, Vianney, Tamayo, Luis Vargas, Todjihounde, Leonard

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In epidemiology, the effective reproduction number is used to characterize the growth rate of an epidemic outbreak. In this paper, we investigate properties of the reproduction number for a modified SEIR model of COVID-19 in the city of Houston, TX USA, in which the population is divided into low-risk and high-risk subpopulations. The response of reproduction number to two types of control measures (testing and distancing) applied to the two different subpopulations is characterized. A nonlinear cost model is used for control measures, to include the effects of diminishing returns. We propose three types of heuristic strategies for mitigating COVID-19 that are targeted at reducing reproduction number, and we exhibit the tradeoffs between strategy implementation costs and number of deaths. We also consider two variants of each type of strategy: basic strategies, which consider only...