Ethical dilemma arises from optimising interventions for epidemics in heterogeneous populations

Kollepara, Pratyush, Chisholm, Rebecca, Kiss, István Z. and Miller, Joel C (2024) Ethical dilemma arises from optimising interventions for epidemics in heterogeneous populations. Journal of The Royal Society Interface. ISSN 1742-5662 (Submitted)

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 minimises 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 policy makers. This ethical dilemma is shown to be analogous to the trolley problem. We apply this optimisation 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. 1

Preview

Text Optimal_intervention_preprint.pdf - Accepted Version Available under License Creative Commons Attribution. Download (586kB)

Official URL:	https://doi.org/10.1098/rsif.2023.0612
Item Type:	Article
Disciplines:	Network Science
Depositing User:	Istvan Kiss
Date Deposited:	21 Dec 2023 12:43
Last Modified:	28 Oct 2024 15:32
URI:	https://nul.repository.guildhe.ac.uk/id/eprint/1582

Actions (login required)

Edit Item