Two viruses competition in the SIR model of epidemic spread: application to COVID-19

The SIR model of the epidemic spread is used for consideration the problem of the competition of two viruses having different contagiousness. It is shown how the more contagious strain replaces over time the less contagious one. In particular the results can be applied to the current situation when the omicron strain appeared in population affected by the delta strain.

The prevention and treatment of Covid-19 and related development during pandemic

When the outbreak of human novel coronavirus was first reported in Wuhan, China at the end of 2019, the epidemic spread rapidly around the world and finally became a pandemic in 2020. In order to seek effective drugs to treat the Covid-19 infected patients for emergent use and for the disease prevention, researchers examined numerous existed antiviral drugs that may have the potential for Covid-19 treatment. At the same time, antibody treatment and vaccines development were ongoing simultaneously. The aim of this review is to introduce antibody therapy, vaccine development and potential antiviral treatments on Covid-19 and to discuss the future perspective on the Covid-19 pandemic.

About Air Meal and Revival of the Black Market

Everyone is anxious that the form of eating and drinking will change drastically due to the pandemic. The immediate challenge is how to overcome the harsh reality of the rush of restaurant closures, but the chance of survival may be found unexpectedly in the black market. Large-capital sushi chains, izakaya chains, family restaurants, and First Foods are also shrinking. Privately owned restaurants have been forced to withdraw before the epidemic spread, but large capital has also been hit hard. Which is faster, to regenerate or restart? Private restaurants with weak capital will soon collapse, but the selling point is the lightness of the footwork that can be rebuilt immediately. It seems that minimalism is likely to become the standard in the post-Corona era

Vaccine Hesitancy and Political Populism. An Invariant Cross-European Perspective

Vaccine-hesitancy and political populism are positively associated across Europe: those countries in which their citizens present higher populist attitudes are those that also have higher vaccine-hesitancy rates. The same key driver fuels them: distrust in institutions, elites, and experts. The reluctance of citizens to be vaccinated fits perfectly in populist political agendas because is a source of instability that has a distinctive characteristic known as the “small pockets” issue. It means that the level at which immunization coverage needs to be maintained to be effective is so high that a small number of vaccine-hesitants have enormous adverse effects on herd immunity and epidemic spread. In pandemic and post-pandemic scenarios, vaccine-hesitancy could be used by populists as one of the most effective tools for generating distrust. This research presents an invariant measurement model applied to 27 EU + UK countries (27,524 participants) that segments the different behaviours found, and gives social-marketing recommendations for coping with the vaccine-hesitancy problem when used for generating distrust.

Listening to Bluetooth Beacons for Epidemic Risk Mitigation

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic let to efforts to develop and deploy digital contact tracing systems to expedite contact tracing and risk notification. Unfortunately, the success of these systems has been limited, partly owing to poor interoperability with manual contact tracing, low adoption rates, and a societally sensitive trade-off between utility and privacy. In this work, we introduce a new privacy-preserving and inclusive system for epidemic risk assessment and notification that aims to address these limitations. Rather than capturing pairwise encounters between user devices as done by existing systems, our system captures encounters between user devices and beacons placed in strategic locations where infection clusters may originate. Epidemiological simulations using an agent-based model demonstrate that, by utilizing location and environmental information and interoperating with manual contact tracing, our system can increase the accuracy of contact tracing actions and may help reduce epidemic spread already at low adoption.

Balancing capacity and epidemic spread in the global airline network

The structure of complex networks has long been understood to play a role in transmission and spreading phenomena on a graph. Such networks form an important part of the structure of society, including transportation networks. As society fights to control the COVID-19 pandemic, an important question is how to choose the optimum balance between the full opening of transport networks and the control of epidemic spread. In this work we investigate the interplay between network dismantling and epidemic spread rate as a proxy for the imposition of travel restrictions to control disease spread. For network dismantling we focus on the weighted and unweighted forms of metrics that capture the topological and informational structure of the network. Our results indicate that there is benefit to a directed approach to imposing travel restrictions, but we identify that more detailed models of the transport network are necessary for definitive results.