ArticleJournal of the Royal Society, Interface2024
Ethical dilemma arises from optimizing interventions for epidemics in heterogeneous populations.
Article in Journal of the Royal Society, Interface, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 3 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
3 citing papers in PubMed.
- Ethical considerations in infectious disease modelling for public health policy: the case of school closures.Interface focus · 2025Article
- Hotspot model shows how location-based superspreading accelerates and reshapes epidemics.PNAS nexus · 2025Article
- Ethical dilemma arises from optimizing interventions for epidemics in heterogeneous populations.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Interventions to mitigate the spread of infectious diseases, while succeeding in their goal, have economic and social costs associated with them. These limit the duration and intensity of the interventions. We study a class of interventions which reduce the reproduction number and find the optimal strength of the intervention which minimizes the final epidemic size for an immunity inducing infection. The intervention works by eliminating the overshoot part of an epidemic, and avoids a second wave of infections. We extend the framework by considering a heterogeneous population and find that the optimal intervention can pose an ethical dilemma for decision and policymakers. This ethical dilemma is shown to be analogous to the trolley problem. We apply this optimization strategy to real-world contact data and case fatality rates from three pandemics to underline the importance of this ethical dilemma in real-world scenarios.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
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.