ArticleJournal of mathematics in industry2020
Beyond just "flattening the curve": Optimal control of epidemics with purely non-pharmaceutical interventions.
Article in Journal of mathematics in industry, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 41 papers.
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Who cites it
41 citing papers in PubMed.
- Minimizing Societal Cost of Epidemics: Optimal Catastrophe Insurance Compensation Allocation.Risk analysis : an official publication of the Society for Risk Analysis · 2026Article
- Understanding Nash epidemics.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- From node to network: weaving a global perspective on efficacy and costs of non-pharmaceutical interventions.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- When should lockdown be implemented? Devising cost-effective strategies for managing epidemics amid vaccine uncertainty.PLoS computational biology · 2024Article
- Agent-based modeling to estimate the impact of lockdown scenarios and events on a pandemic exemplified on SARS-CoV-2.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Is SARS-CoV-2 elimination or mitigation best? Regional and disease characteristics determine the recommended strategy.Royal Society open science · 2024Article
- Optimal social distancing in epidemic control: cost prioritization, adherence and insights into preparedness principles.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Rational social distancing policy during epidemics with limited healthcare capacity.PLoS computational biology · 2023Article
- Path integral control of a stochastic multi-risk SIR pandemic model.Theory in biosciences = Theorie in den Biowissenschaften · 2023Article
- Optimal strategies for coordinating infection control and socio-economic activities.Mathematics and computers in simulation · 2023Article
- Optimal timing of non-pharmaceutical interventions during an epidemic.European journal of operational research · 2023Article
- Effectiveness of feedback control and the trade-off between death by COVID-19 and costs of countermeasures.Health care management science · 2023Article
- Minimising the use of costly control measures in an epidemic elimination strategy: A simple mathematical model.Mathematical biosciences · 2022Article
- Socio-economic analysis of short-term trends of COVID-19: modeling and data analytics.BMC public health · 2022Article
- Controlling epidemic diseases based only on social distancing level: General case.ISA transactions · 2022Article
- A parametrized nonlinear predictive control strategy for relaxing COVID-19 social distancing measures in Brazil.ISA transactions · 2022Article
- Incentives, lockdown, and testing: from Thucydides' analysis to the COVID-19 pandemic.Journal of mathematical biology · 2022Article
- Multiscale heterogeneous optimal lockdown control for COVID-19 using geographic information.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Transmission dynamics model and the coronavirus disease 2019 epidemic: applications and challenges.Medical review (2021) · 2022Review
- Iterative data-driven forecasting of the transmission and management of SARS-CoV-2/COVID-19 using social interventions at the county-level.Scientific reports · 2022Article
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2 authors.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
When effective medical treatment and vaccination are not available, non-pharmaceutical interventions such as social distancing, home quarantine and far-reaching shutdown of public life are the only available strategies to prevent the spread of epidemics. Based on an extended SEIR (susceptible-exposed-infectious-recovered) model and continuous-time optimal control theory, we compute the optimal non-pharmaceutical intervention strategy for the case that a vaccine is never found and complete containment (eradication of the epidemic) is impossible. In this case, the optimal control must meet competing requirements: First, the minimization of disease-related deaths, and, second, the establishment of a sufficient degree of natural immunity at the end of the measures, in order to exclude a second wave. Moreover, the socio-economic costs of the intervention shall be kept at a minimum. The numerically computed optimal control strategy is a single-intervention scenario that goes beyond heuristically motivated interventions and simple "flattening of the curve". Careful analysis of the computed control strategy reveals, however, that the obtained solution is in fact a tightrope walk close to the stability boundary of the system, where socio-economic costs and the risk of a new outbreak must be constantly balanced against one another. The model system is calibrated to reproduce the initial exponential growth phase of the COVID-19 pandemic in Germany.
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