Impact of Public Health Education Program on the Novel Coronavirus Outbreak in the United States

The coronavirus outbreak in the United States continues to pose a serious threat to human lives. Public health measures to slow down the spread of the virus involve using a face mask, social-distancing, and frequent hand washing. Since the beginning of the pandemic, there has been a global campaign on the use of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) to curtail the spread of the virus. However, the number of cases, mortality, and hospitalization continue to rise globally, including in the United States. We developed a mathematical model to assess the impact of a public health education program on the coronavirus outbreak in the United States. Our simulation showed the prospect of an effective public health education program in reducing both the cumulative and daily mortality of the novel coronavirus. Finally, our result suggests the need to obey public health measures as loss of willingness would increase the cumulative and daily mortality in the United States

A model of insect control with imperfect treatment

© 2019, © 2019 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. Insecticide spraying of housing units is an important control measure for vector-borne infections such as Chagas disease. However, some vectors may survive treatment, due to imperfect spraying by the operator or because they hide deep in the cracks or other places, and re-emerge in the same unit when the effect of the insecticide wears off. While several mathematical models of this phenomenon have been previously described and studied in the literature, the model presented here is more basic than existing ones. Thus it is more amenable to mathematical analysis, which is carried out here. In particular, we demonstrate that an initially very high spraying rate may push the system into a region of the state space with low endemic levels of infestation that can be maintained in the long run at relatively moderate cost, while in the absence of an aggressive initial intervention the same average cost would only allow a much less significant reduction in long-term infestation levels