ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2017
Essential information: Uncertainty and optimal control of Ebola outbreaks.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 27 papers.
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Who cites it
27 citing papers in PubMed.
- Evaluating the impact of trade-offs in diagnostic test accuracy, time-to-isolation, and accessibility on outbreak response for the Ebola virus: a mathematical modeling study.BMC infectious diseases · 2025Article
- Potential benefits of adaptive control strategies are outweighed by costs of infrequent, but dramatically larger disease outbreaks.Royal Society open science · 2025Article
- Asymmetric limits on timely interventions from noisy epidemic data.Communications physics · 2025Article
- How does policy modelling work in practice? A global analysis on the use of epidemiological modelling in health crises.PLOS global public health · 2025Article
- Characterising information gains and losses when collecting multiple epidemic model outputs.Epidemics · 2024Article
- Multiple models for outbreak decision support in the face of uncertainty.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Optimizing two-dose vaccine resource allocation to combat a pandemic in the context of limited supply: The case of COVID-19.Frontiers in public health · 2023Article
- Vote-processing rules for combining control recommendations from multiple models.Philosophical transactions. Series A, Mathematical, physical, and engineering sciences · 2022Article
- Challenges in estimation, uncertainty quantification and elicitation for pandemic modelling.Epidemics · 2022Article
- Design a robust sliding mode controller based on the state and parameter estimation for the nonlinear epidemiological model of Covid-19.Nonlinear dynamics · 2022Article
- Governance structure affects transboundary disease management under alternative objectives.BMC public health · 2021Article
- Trade-offs between individual and ensemble forecasts of an emerging infectious disease.Nature communications · 2021Article
- Weighing the unknowns: Value of Information for biological and operational uncertainty in invasion management.The Journal of applied ecology · 2021Article
- State estimation-based control of COVID-19 epidemic before and after vaccine development.Journal of process control · 2021Article
- Rational policymaking during a pandemic.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2021Article
- Anticipating future learning affects current control decisions: A comparison between passive and active adaptive management in an epidemiological setting.Journal of theoretical biology · 2020Article
- Predictive accuracy of a hierarchical logistic model of cumulative SARS-CoV-2 case growth until May 2020.BMC medical research methodology · 2020Article
- COVID-19 reopening strategies at the county level in the face of uncertainty: Multiple Models for Outbreak Decision Support.medRxiv : the preprint server for health sciences · 2020Article
- The SEIRS model for infectious disease dynamics.Nature methods · 2020Article
- Impacts of environmental and socio-economic factors on emergence and epidemic potential of Ebola in Africa.Nature communications · 2019Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
9 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Early resolution of uncertainty during an epidemic outbreak can lead to rapid and efficient decision making, provided that the uncertainty affects prioritization of actions. The wide range in caseload projections for the 2014 Ebola outbreak caused great concern and debate about the utility of models. By coding and running 37 published Ebola models with five candidate interventions, we found that, despite this large variation in caseload projection, the ranking of management options was relatively consistent. Reducing funeral transmission and reducing community transmission were generally ranked as the two best options. Value of information (VoI) analyses show that caseloads could be reduced by 11% by resolving all model-specific uncertainties, with information about model structure accounting for 82% of this reduction and uncertainty about caseload only accounting for 12%. Our study shows that the uncertainty that is of most interest epidemiologically may not be the same as the uncertainty that is most relevant for management. If the goal is to improve management outcomes, then the focus of study should be to identify and resolve those uncertainties that most hinder the choice of an optimal intervention. Our study further shows that simplifying multiple alternative models into a smaller number of relevant groups (here, with shared structure) could streamline the decision-making process and may allow for a better integration of epidemiological modeling and decision making for policy.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.