Curbing Pandemic Through Evolutionary Algorithm-Based Priority Aware Mobility Scheduling

COVID-19 is a global pandemic caused by the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2. While swift vaccine development and distribution have arrested the infection spread rate, it is necessary to design public policies that inform human mobility to curb outbreaks from future strains of the virus. While existing non-pharmaceutical approaches employing network science and machine learning offer promising travel policy solutions, they are guided by epidemiological and economic considerations alone and not human itineraries. We introduce an evolutionary algorithm (EA) based mobility scheduler that incorporates the personalized itineraries of individuals to determine the ideal timing of their mobility. We mathematically analyze the computational efficiency versus the optimality trade-off of the mobility scheduler. Through extensive simulations, we demonstrate that the EA-based mobility scheduler can balance the trade-off between (1) optimality and computational cost and (2) fair and preferential human mobility while reducing contagion under lockdown and no-lockdown as well as even and uneven human mobility traffic scenarios. We show that for two human mobility models, the scheduler exhibits lower infection numbers than a baseline trip-planning approach that directs human traffic along the least congested route to minimize contagion. We discuss that the EA scheduler lends itself to intricate mobility schedules of multiple destination choices with varying priorities and socioeconomic and demographic considerations.

Hierarchical Vaccine Allocation based on Epidemiological and Behavioral Considerations.

Vaccines have proven useful in curbing contagion from new strains of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. However, equitable vaccine allocation continues to be a significant challenge worldwide, necessitating a comprehensive allocation strategy incorporating heterogeneity in epidemiological and behavioral considerations. In this paper, we present a hierarchical allocation strategy that assigns vaccines to zones and their constituent neighborhoods cost-effectively, based on their population density, susceptibility, infected count, and attitude towards vaccinations. Moreover, it includes a module that tackles vaccine shortages in certain zones by locally transferring vaccines from zones with surplus vaccines. We leverage the epidemiological, socio-demographic, and social media datasets from Chicago and Greece and their constituent community areas to show that the proposed allocation approach assigns vaccines based on the chosen criteria and captures the effects of disparate vaccine adoption rates. We conclude the paper with a lowdown on future efforts to extend this study to design models for effective public policies and vaccination strategies that curtail vaccine purchase costs.

Quantifying Mobility and Mixing Propensity in the Spatiotemporal Context of a Pandemic Spread.

COVID-19 is the most acute global public health crisis of this century. Current trends in the global infected and death numbers suggest that human mobility leading to high social mixing are key players in infection spread, making it imperative to incorporate the spatiotemporal and mobility contexts to future prediction models. In this work, we present a generalized spatiotemporal model that quantifies the role of human social mixing propensity and mobility in pandemic spread through a composite latent factor. The proposed model calculates the exposed population count by utilizing a nonlinear least-squares optimization that exploits the intrinsic linearity in SEIR (Susceptible, Exposed, Infectious, or Recovered). We also present inverse coefficient of variation of the daily exposed curve as a measure for infection duration and spread. We carry out experiments on the mobility and COVID-19 infected and death curves of New York City to show that boroughs with high inter-zone mobility indeed exhibit synchronicity in peaks of the daily exposed curve as well as similar social mixing patterns. Furthermore, we demonstrate that several nations with high inverse coefficient of variations in daily exposed numbers are amongst the worst COVID-19 affected places. Our insights on the effects of lockdown on human mobility motivate future research in the identification of hotspots, design of intelligent mobility strategies and quarantine procedures to curb infection spread.

Scalable and distributed strategies for socially distanced human mobility.

COVID-19 is a global health crisis that has caused ripples in every aspect of human life. Amid widespread vaccinations testing, manufacture and distribution efforts, nations still rely on human mobility restrictions to mitigate infection and death tolls. New waves of infection in many nations, indecisiveness on the efficacy of existing vaccinations, and emerging strains of the virus call for intelligent mobility policies that utilize contact pattern and epidemiological data to check contagion. Our earlier work leveraged network science principles to design social distancing optimization approaches that show promise in slowing infection spread however, they prove to be computationally prohibitive and require complete knowledge of the social network. In this work, we present scalable and distributed versions of the optimization approaches based on Markov Chain Monte Carlo Gibbs sampling and grid-based spatial parallelization that tackle both the challenges faced by the optimization strategies. We perform extensive simulation experiments to show the ability of the proposed strategies to meet necessary network science measures and yield performance comparable to the optimal counterpart, while exhibiting significant speed-up. We study the scalability of the proposed strategies as well as their performance in realistic scenarios when a fraction of the population temporarily flouts the location recommendations.

Spatiotemporal tracing of pandemic spread from infection data.

COVID-19, a global pandemic caused by the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 virus, has claimed millions of lives worldwide. Amid soaring contagion due to newer strains of the virus, it is imperative to design dynamic, spatiotemporal models to contain the spread of infection during future outbreaks of the same or variants of the virus. The reliance on existing prediction and contact tracing approaches on prior knowledge of inter- or intra-zone mobility renders them impracticable. We present a spatiotemporal approach that employs a network inference approach with sliding time windows solely on the date and number of daily infection numbers of zones within a geographical region to generate temporal networks capturing the influence of each zone on another. It helps analyze the spatial interaction among the hotspot or spreader zones and highly affected zones based on the flow of network contagion traffic. We apply the proposed approach to the daily infection counts of New York State as well as the states of USA to show that it effectively measures the phase shifts in the pandemic timeline. It identifies the spreaders and affected zones at different time points and helps infer the trajectory of the pandemic spread across the country. A small set of zones periodically exhibit a very high outflow of contagion traffic over time, suggesting that they act as the key spreaders of infection. Moreover, the strong influence between the majority of non-neighbor regions suggests that the overall spread of infection is a result of the unavoidable long-distance trips by a large number of people as opposed to the shorter trips at a county level, thereby informing future mitigation measures and public policies.

A machine learning approach identifies 5-ASA and ulcerative colitis as being linked with higher COVID-19 mortality in patients with IBD.

Inflammatory bowel diseases (IBD), namely Crohn's disease (CD) and ulcerative colitis (UC) are chronic inflammation within the gastrointestinal tract. IBD patient conditions and treatments, such as with immunosuppressants, may result in a higher risk of viral and bacterial infection and more severe outcomes of infections. The effect of the clinical and demographic factors on the prognosis of COVID-19 among IBD patients is still a significant area of investigation. The lack of available data on a large set of COVID-19 infected IBD patients has hindered progress. To circumvent this lack of large patient data, we present a random sampling approach to generate clinical COVID-19 outcomes (outpatient management, hospitalized and recovered, and hospitalized and deceased) on 20,000 IBD patients modeled on reported summary statistics obtained from the Surveillance Epidemiology of Coronavirus Under Research Exclusion (SECURE-IBD), an international database to monitor and report on outcomes of COVID-19 occurring in IBD patients. We apply machine learning approaches to perform a comprehensive analysis of the primary and secondary covariates to predict COVID-19 outcome in IBD patients. Our analysis reveals that age, medication usage and the number of comorbidities are the primary covariates, while IBD severity, smoking history, gender and IBD subtype (CD or UC) are key secondary features. In particular, elderly male patients with ulcerative colitis, several preexisting conditions, and who smoke comprise a highly vulnerable IBD population. Moreover, treatment with 5-ASAs (sulfasalazine/mesalamine) shows a high association with COVID-19/IBD mortality. Supervised machine learning that considers age, number of comorbidities and medication usage can predict COVID-19/IBD outcomes with approximately 70% accuracy. We explore the challenge of drawing demographic inferences from existing COVID-19/IBD data. Overall, there are fewer IBD case reports from US states with poor health ranking hindering these analyses. Generation of patient characteristics based on known summary statistics allows for increased power to detect IBD factors leading to variable COVID-19 outcomes. There is under-reporting of COVID-19 in IBD patients from US states with poor health ranking, underpinning the perils of using the repository to derive demographic information.

A Comparative NLP-Based Study on the Current Trends and Future Directions in COVID-19 Research.

COVID-19 is a global health crisis that has altered human life and still promises to create ripples of death and destruction in its wake. The sea of scientific literature published over a short time-span to understand and mitigate this global phenomenon necessitates concerted efforts to organize our findings and focus on the unexplored facets of the disease. In this work, we applied natural language processing (NLP) based approaches on scientific literature published on COVID-19 to infer significant keywords that have contributed to our social, economic, demographic, psychological, epidemiological, clinical, and medical understanding of this pandemic. We identify key terms appearing in COVID literature that vary in representation when compared to other virus-borne diseases such as MERS, Ebola, and Influenza. We also identify countries, topics, and research articles that demonstrate that the scientific community is still reacting to the short-term threats such as transmissibility, health risks, treatment plans, and public policies, underpinning the need for collective international efforts towards long-term immunization and drug-related challenges. Furthermore, our study highlights several long-term research directions that are urgently needed for COVID-19 such as: global collaboration to create international open-access data repositories, policymaking to curb future outbreaks, psychological repercussions of COVID-19, vaccine development for SARS-CoV-2 variants and their long-term efficacy studies, and mental health issues in both children and elderly.

Identifying key indicators of job loss trends during COVID-19 and beyond.

COVID-19, declared by the World Health Organization as a Public Health Emergency of International Concern, has claimed over 2.7 million lives worldwide. In the absence of vaccinations, social distancing and lockdowns emerged as the means to curb infection spread, with the downside of bringing the world economy to a standstill. In this work, we explore the epidemiological, socioeconomic and demographic factors affecting the unemployment rates of United States that may contribute towards policymaking to contain contagion and mortality while balancing the economy in the future. We identify the ethnic groups and job sectors that are affected by the pandemic and demonstrate that Gross Domestic Product (GDP), race, age group, lockdown severity and infected count are the key indicators of post-COVID job loss trends.

Leveraging Network Science for Social Distancing to Curb Pandemic Spread.

COVID-19 has irreversibly upended the course of human life and compelled countries to invoke national emergencies and strict public guidelines. As the scientific community is in the early stages of rigorous clinical testing to come up with effective vaccination measures, the world is still heavily reliant on social distancing to curb the rapid spread and mortality rates. In this work, we present three optimization strategies to guide human mobility and restrict contact of susceptible and infective individuals. The proposed strategies rely on well-studied concepts of network science, such as clustering and homophily, as well as two different scenarios of the SEIRD epidemic model. We also propose a new metric, called contagion potential, to gauge the infectivity of individuals in a social setting. Our extensive simulation experiments show that the recommended mobility approaches slow down spread considerably when compared against several standard human mobility models. Finally, as a case study of the mobility strategies, we introduce a mobile application, MyCovid, that provides periodic location recommendations to the registered app users.

Towards Dynamic lockdown strategies controlling pandemic spread under healthcare resource budget.

COVID-19 is one of the deadliest pandemics in modern human history that has killed nearly a million people and rapidly inundated the healthcare resources around the world. Current lockdown measures to curb infection spread are threatening to bring the world economy to a halt, necessitating dynamic lockdown policies that incorporate the healthcare resource budget of people in a zone. We conceive a dynamic pandemic lockdown strategy that employs reinforcement learning to modulate the zone mobility, while restricting the COVID-19 hospitalizations within its healthcare resource budget. We employ queueing theory to model the inflow and outflow of patients and validate the approach through extensive simulation on real demographic and epidemiological data from the boroughs of New York City. Our experiments demonstrate that this approach can not only adapt to the varying trends in contagion in a region by regulating its own lockdown level, but also manages the overheads associated with time-varying dynamic lockdown policies.

Recreational and philanthropic sectors are the worst-hit US industries in the COVID-19 aftermath.

Lockdown measures to curb the spread of COVID-19 has brought the world economy on the brink of a recession. It is imperative that nations formulate administrative policies based on the changing economic landscape. In this work, we apply a statistical approach, called topic modeling, on text documents of job loss notices of 26 US states to identify the specific states and industrial sectors affected economically by this ongoing public health crisis. Our analysis reveals that there is a considerable incongruity in job loss patterns between the pre- and during-COVID timelines in several states and the recreational and philanthropic sectors register high job losses. It further shows that the interplay among several possible socioeconomic factors would lead to job losses in many sectors, while also creating new job opportunities in other sectors such as public service, pharmaceuticals and media, making the job loss trends a key indicator of the world economy. Finally, we compare the low income job loss rates against overall job losses due to COVID-19 in the US counties, and discuss the implications of press reports on reopening businesses and the unemployed workforce being absorbed by other sectors.

Factors affecting COVID-19 infected and death rates inform lockdown-related policymaking.

BACKGROUND: After claiming nearly five hundred thousand lives globally, the COVID-19 pandemic is showing no signs of slowing down. While the UK, USA, Brazil and parts of Asia are bracing themselves for the second wave-or the extension of the first wave-it is imperative to identify the primary social, economic, environmental, demographic, ethnic, cultural and health factors contributing towards COVID-19 infection and mortality numbers to facilitate mitigation and control measures. METHODS: We process several open-access datasets on US states to create an integrated dataset of potential factors leading to the pandemic spread. We then apply several supervised machine learning approaches to reach a consensus as well as rank the key factors. We carry out regression analysis to pinpoint the key pre-lockdown factors that affect post-lockdown infection and mortality, informing future lockdown-related policy making. FINDINGS: Population density, testing numbers and airport traffic emerge as the most discriminatory factors, followed by higher age groups (above 40 and specifically 60+). Post-lockdown infected and death rates are highly influenced by their pre-lockdown counterparts, followed by population density and airport traffic. While healthcare index seems uncorrelated with mortality rate, principal component analysis on the key features show two groups: states (1) forming early epicenters and (2) experiencing strong second wave or peaking late in rate of infection and death. Finally, a small case study on New York City shows that days-to-peak for infection of neighboring boroughs correlate better with inter-zone mobility than the inter-zone distance. INTERPRETATION: States forming the early hotspots are regions with high airport or road traffic resulting in human interaction. US states with high population density and testing tend to exhibit consistently high infected and death numbers. Mortality rate seems to be driven by individual physiology, preexisting condition, age etc., rather than gender, healthcare facility or ethnic predisposition. Finally, policymaking on the timing of lockdowns should primarily consider the pre-lockdown infected numbers along with population density and airport traffic.