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Register a new userPredicting the extinction of Ebola spreading in Liberia due to mitigation strategies
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The Ebola virus is spreading throughout West Africa and is causing thousands of deaths. In order to quantify the effectiveness of different strategies for controlling the spread, we develop a mathematical model in which the propagation of the Ebola virus through Liberia is caused by travel between counties. For the initial months in which the Ebola virus spreads, we find that the arrival times of the disease into the counties predicted by our model are compatible with World Health Organization data, but we also find that reducing mobility is insufficient to contain the epidemic because it delays the arrival of Ebola virus in each county by only a few weeks. We study the effect of a strategy in which safe burials are increased and effective hospitalisation instituted under two scenarios: (i) one implemented in mid-July 2014 and (ii) one in mid-August---which was the actual time that strong interventions began in Liberia. We find that if scenario (i) had been pursued the lifetime of the epidemic would have been three months shorter and the total number of infected individuals 80% less than in scenario (ii). Our projection under scenario (ii) is that the spreading will stop by mid-spring 2015.
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An Ebola outbreak of unparalleled size is currently affecting several countries in West Africa, and international efforts to control the outbreak are underway. However, the efficacy of these interventions, and their likely impact on an Ebola epidemic of this size, is unknown. Forecasting and simulation of these interventions may inform public health efforts. We use existing data from Liberia and Sierra Leone to parameterize a mathematical model of Ebola and use this model to forecast the progression of the epidemic, as well as the efficacy of several interventions, including increased contact tracing, improved infection control practices, the use of a hypothetical pharmaceutical intervention to improve survival in hospitalized patients. Model forecasts until Dec. 31, 2014 show an increasingly severe epidemic with no sign of having reached a peak. Modeling results suggest that increased contact tracing, improved infection control, or a combination of the two can have a substantial impact on the number of Ebola cases, but these interventions are not sufficient to halt the progress of the epidemic. The hypothetical pharmaceutical intervention, while impacting mortality, had a smaller effect on the forecasted trajectory of the epidemic. Near-term, practical interventions to address the ongoing Ebola epidemic may have a beneficial impact on public health, but they will not result in the immediate halting, or even obvious slowing of the epidemic. A long-term commitment of resources and support will be necessary to address the outbreak.
We study the evolution of cooperation as a birth-death process in spatially extended populations. The benefit from the altruistic behavior of a cooperator is implemented by decreasing the death rate of its direct neighbors. The cost of cooperation is the increase of a cooperators death rate proportional to the number of its neighbors. When cooperation has higher cost than benefit, cooperators disappear. Then the dynamics reduces to the contact process with defectors as the single particle type. Increasing the benefit-cost ratio above 1, the extinction transition of the contact process splits into a set of nonequilibrium transitions between four regimes when increasing the baseline death rate $p$ as a control parameter: (i) defection only, (ii) coexistence, (iii) cooperation only, (iv) extinction. We investigate the transitions between these regimes. As the main result, we find that full cooperation is established at the extinction transition as long as benefit is strictly larger than cost. Qualitatively identical phase diagrams are obtained for populations on square lattices and in pair approximation. Spatial correlations with nearest neighbors only are thus sufficient for sustained cooperation.
The course of an epidemic exhibits average growth dynamics determined by features of the pathogen and the population, yet also features significant variability reflecting the stochastic nature of disease spread. The interplay of biological, social, structural and random factors makes disease forecasting extraordinarily complex. In this work, we reframe a stochastic branching process analysis in terms of probability generating functions and compare it to continuous time epidemic simulations on networks. In doing so, we predict the diversity of emerging epidemic courses on both homogeneous and heterogeneous networks. We show how the challenge of inferring the early course of an epidemic falls on the randomness of disease spread more so than on the heterogeneity of contact patterns. We provide an analysis which helps quantify, in real time, the probability that an epidemic goes supercritical or conversely, dies stochastically. These probabilities are often assumed to be one and zero, respectively, if the basic reproduction number, or R0, is greater than 1, ignoring the heterogeneity and randomness inherent to disease spread. This framework can give more insight into early epidemic spread by weighting standard deterministic models with likelihood to inform pandemic preparedness with probabilistic forecasts.
We propose a simple SIR model in order to investigate the impact of various confinement strategies on a most virulent epidemic. Our approach is motivated by the current COVID-19 pandemic. The main hypothesis is the existence of two populations of susceptible persons, one which obeys confinement and for which the infection rate does not exceed 1, and a population which, being non confined for various imperatives, can be substantially more infective. The model, initially formulated as a differential system, is discretised following a specific procedure, the discrete system serving as an integrator for the differential one. Our model is calibrated so as to correspond to what is observed in the COVID-19 epidemic. Several conclusions can be reached, despite the very simple structure of our model. First, it is not possible to pinpoint the genesis of the epidemic by just analysing data from when the epidemic is in full swing. It may well turn out that the epidemic has reached a sizeable part of the world months before it became noticeable. Concerning the confinement scenarios, a universal feature of all our simulations is that relaxing the lockdown constraints leads to a rekindling of the epidemic. Thus we sought the conditions for the second epidemic peak to be lower than the first one. This is possible in all the scenarios considered (abrupt, progressive or stepwise exit) but typically a progressive exit can start earlier than an abrupt one. However, by the time the progressive exit is complete, the overall confinement times are not too different. From our results, the most promising strategy is that of a stepwise exit. And in fact its implementation could be quite feasible, with the major part of the population (minus the fragile groups) exiting simultaneously but obeying rigorous distancing constraints.
Cooperators forgo their interest to benefit others. Thus cooperation should not be favored by natural selection. It challenges the evolutionists, since cooperation is widespread. As one of the resolutions, information spreading has been revealed to play a key role in the emergence of cooperation. Individuals, however, are typically assumed to be passive in the information spreading. Here we assume that individuals are active to spread the information via self-recommendation. Individuals with higher intensities of self-recommendation are likely to have more neighbors. We find that i) eloquent cooperators are necessary to promote cooperation; ii) individuals need to be open to the self-recommendation to enhance cooperation level; iii) the cost-to-benefit ratio should be smaller than one minus the ratio between self-recommendation intensities of defector and cooperator, which qualitatively measures the viscosity of the population. Our results highlight the importance of active information spreading on cooperation.
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