Huaiping Zhu

• Phd, Montreal 2000
• Professor at York University

Forecasting the transmission patterns of infectious diseases is of paramount importance in gaining valuable insights into outbreak growth and optimizing the allocation of medical resources. In this paper, we conduct a comparative study between a physics-based model and a machine learning (ML) model for epidemic forecasting and countermeasures, cons...

Bistability is a ubiquitous phenomenon in life sciences. In this paper, two kinds of bistable structures in two-dimensional dynamical systems are studied: one is two one-point attractors, another is a one-point attractor accompanied by a cycle attractor. By the Conley index theory, we prove that there exist other isolated invariant sets besides the...

The IPCC-endorsed multiple model/scenario approach and a state-of-the-science combined downscaling methodology were applied to project the future climate changes over Ontario and the Canadian Great Lakes basins. Significant warming is expected across the province under all RCPs. Relative to 1986–2005 averages, the highest temperature rise is projec...

Dengue fever is the most common arboviral infection of humans, responsible for a substantial disease burden to the world. Lately, an innovative technology has been approved to suppress natural mosquitoes by releasing Wolbachia-carrying male mosquitoes. To depict the transmission of dengue virus among mosquito and human populations, we respectively...

In the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic, China has long adhered to the "Dynamic Zero COVID-19" strategy till the end of 2022. To understand the mechanism of this strategy, we used the case of the Yangzhou summer outbreak in 2021 and a multi-stage dynamical model incorporating city-wide and key area testing-trace-isolation (TTI) strategies. We de...

Dengue is the most rapidly spreading mosquito-borne disease that poses great threats to public health. We propose a compartmental model with primary and secondary infection and targeted vaccination to assess the impact of serostatus-dependent immunization on mitigating the spread of dengue virus. We derive the basic reproduction number and investig...

Bifurcations and related dynamical behaviors of a glucose metabolism model are thoroughly studied in this paper. It is shown that the model undergoes transcritical, Hopf, degenerate Hopf, saddle-node, cusp, and zero-Hopf bifurcations, as well as Bogdanov–Takens bifurcations of codimensions 2 and 3. Considering the periodicity of hepatic glucose pro...

In this paper, we propose a two-patch model with border control to investigate the effect of border control measures and local non-pharmacological interventions (NPIs) on the transmission of COVID-19. The basic reproduction number of the model is calculated, and the existence and stability of the boundary equilibria and the existence of the coexist...

Current persistent outbreak of COVID-19 is triggering a series of collective responses to avoid infection. To further clarify the impact mechanism of adaptive protection behavior and vaccination, we developed a new transmission model via a delay differential system, which parameterized the roles of adaptive behaviors and vaccination, and allowed to...

Background The monkeypox outbreak in non-endemic countries in recent months has led the World Health Organization (WHO) to declare a public health emergency of international concern (PHEIC). It is thought that festivals, parties, and other gatherings may have contributed to the outbreak. Methods We considered a hypothetical metropolitan city and m...

Climate change significantly affects global and regional agriculture production thus food security. There are currently large areas suitable for maize production in the regions surrounding the Great Lakes (the Great Lakes region, GLR), one of the major maize production regions and economic engines in North America and the world. Will the GLR remain...

Since the beginning of March 2022, the epidemic due to the Omicron variant has developed rapidly in Jilin Province. To figure out the key controlling factors and validate the model to show the success of the Zero-COVID policy in the province, we constructed a Recursive Zero-COVID Model quantifying the strength of the control measures, and defined t...

Initial efforts to mitigate the COVID-19 pandemic have relied heavily on non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs), including physical distancing, hand hygiene, and mask-wearing. However, an effective vaccine is essential to containing the spread of the virus. We developed a compartmental model to examine different vaccine strategies for controlling...

In this paper, we propose a time-periodic reaction–diffusion model with environment transmission and spatial heterogeneity to describe the transmission of avian influenza virus between birds, poultry and human population. Firstly, we study the well-posedness of solutions, including the existence and boundedness of global solutions and the existence...

Background Countries that aimed for eliminating the cases of COVID-19 with test-trace-isolate policy are found to have lower infections, deaths, and better economic performance, compared with those that opted for other mitigation strategies. However, the continuous evolution of new strains has raised the question of whether COVID-19 eradication is...

Objective: To model the spread of Monkeypox (MPX) in a metropolitan area for assessing the risk of possible outbreaks, and identifying essential public health measures to contain the virus spread. Methods: The animal reservoir is the key element in the modelling of a zoonotic disease. Using a One Health approach, we model the spread of the MPX v...

Background Monkeypox cases keep soaring in non-endemic's countries and areas in the last few months, leading to the WHO declaring a Public Health Emergency of International Concern. The ongoing and coming festivals, parties and holidays gathering events are causing increased concerns about possible outbreaks. Methods We considered a hypothetical me...

Background Since December 2020, public health agencies have implemented a variety of vaccination strategies to curb the spread of SARS-CoV-2, along with pre-existing Nonpharmaceutical Interventions (NPIs). Initial strategies focused on vaccinating the elderly to prevent hospitalizations and deaths, but with vaccines becoming available to the broade...

Objective To model the spread of Monkeypox (MPX) in a metropolitan area for assessing the risk of possible outbreaks, and identifying essential public health measures to contain the virus spread. Methods The animal reservoir is the key element in the modelling of a zoonotic disease. Using a one health approach, we model the spread of the MPX virus...

We propose a generalist predator-prey model with stage structure for prey to explore the bifurcations and complex dynamics of tea green leafhopper pest and predatory mite. Using qualitative and bifurcation theory of dynamical systems, we carry out bifurcation analysis of the three-dimensional nonlinear system, including saddle-node bifurcation of c...

In order to understand how Wuhan curbed the COVID-19 outbreak in 2020, we build a network transmission model of 123 dimensions incorporating the impact of quarantine and medical resources as well as household transmission. Using our new model, the final infection size of Wuhan is predicted to be 50,662 (95%CI: 46,234, 55,493), and the epidemic woul...

Background: Globally, nonpharmaceutical interventions for COVID-19, including stay-at-home policies, limitations on gatherings and closure of public spaces, are being lifted. We explored the effect of lifting a stay-at-home policy on virus resurgence under different conditions. Methods: Using confirmed case data from Toronto, Canada, between Feb...

Introduction: With the large-scale roll-out of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) booster vaccination effort (a vaccine dose given 6 months after completing primary vaccination) in China, we explore when and how China could lift non-pharmacological interventions (NPIs) against COVID-19 in 2022. Methods: Using a modified susceptible-infectio...

In this paper, we systematical study the rich dynamics and complex bifurcations of a non-monotonic predator–prey system with a constant releasing rate for the predator. We prove that the system can have at most three positive equilibria, and can undergo a sequence of bifurcations, including transcritical, saddle-node, Hopf, degenerate Hopf, double...

At the end of 2021, with the rapid escalation of COVID19 cases due to the Omicron variant, testing centres in Canada were overwhelmed. To alleviate the pressure on the PCR testing capacity, many provinces implemented new strategies that promote self testing and adjust the eligibility for PCR tests, making the count of new cases underreported. We de...

The first case of Corona Virus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) was reported in Wuhan, China in December 2019. Since then, COVID-19 has quickly spread out to all provinces in China and over 150 countries or territories in the world. With the first level response to public health emergencies (FLRPHE) launched over the country, the outbreak of COVID-19 in Chi...

Many countries have adopted border closures and other jurisdictions (provinces, states, cities, etc.) to control the spread of SARS-CoV-2. Such measures have significantly restricted population movement and have thus led to immense economic and social fallouts. We build a Susceptible-Exposed-Asymptomatic- Infectious (prodromal phase)- Infectious (w...

Operating schools safely during the COVID-19 pandemic requires a balance between health risks and the need for in-person learning. Using demographic and epidemiological data between 31 July and 23 November 2020 from Toronto, Canada, we developed a compartmental transmission model with age, household and setting structure to study the impact of scho...

The spread of COVID-19 in Wuhan was successfully curbed under the strategy of "Joint Prevention and Control Mechanism." To understand how this measure stopped the epidemics in Wuhan, we establish a compartmental model with time-varying parameters over different stages. In the early stage of the epidemic, due to resource limitations, the number of d...

Background: The current epidemic of COVID-19 has become the new normal. However, the novel coronavirus is constantly mutating. In public transportation or large entertainment venues, it can spread more quickly once an infected person is introduced. This study aims to discuss whether large public facilities can be opened and operated under the curre...

To investigate the impact of the number of hospital beds on the control of infectious diseases and help allocate the limited medical resources in a region, a SEIHR epidemic model including exposed and hospitalized classes is established. Different from available models, the hospitalization rate is expressed as a function of the number of empty beds...

Seasonality is the common phenomena in ecological evolution. Firstly, we formulate and explore a simplified West Nile virus model, which describes the transmission of West Nile virus driven by seasonal fluctuations in a spatially variable habitat where the spatial movement of the infectious mosquitoes and infectious birds are described by Laplace d...

Background Cystic echinococcosis is one of the most severe helminth zoonosis with a drastic impact on human health and livestock industry. Investigating optimal control strategy and assessing the crucial factors are essential for developing countermeasures to mitigate this disease. Methods Two compartment models were formulated to study the dynami...

The tea green leafhopper Empoasca onukii is one kind of insect pest threatening the tea production, and the mite Anystis baccarum has been used as an agent for pest control. In this paper, we introduce a generalist predator-prey model to study the dynamics for informing biological control. There have been some bifurcation studies of the generalist...

Since the outbreak of African swine fever (ASF) in Shengyang, it has kept spreading in China. In the early stage of the epidemic, multi-point and concentrated outbreaks were mainly in the swill feeding areas. In this paper, we developed compartmental models to investigate the transmission of ASF in several raising units including Guquan, Jinba and...

Background: Since December 2020, public health agencies have implemented a variety of vaccination strategies to curb the spread of SARS-CoV-2, along with pre-existing Nonpharmaceutical Interventions (NPIs). Initial strategy focused on vaccinating the elderly to prevent hospitalizations and deaths. With vaccines becoming available to the broader pop...

The Asian citrus psyllid (ACP) survival in the presence of contact insecticides may be through physiological adaptations or by behaviorally avoiding. Curiously, although the first alternative is the object of frequent attention, the second was often neglected, but both may lead to insecticide resistance. In this paper, we characterize the growth dy...

African swine fever virus (ASFV) leads to a highly contagious, lethal and economically devastating disease among pigs. Since no effective treatment for the disease, it is crucial to investigate its transmission mechanism and control strategies in large-scale pig farms. We first established a toy model to explore ASFV spread in one pig unit. Then a...

In this paper, we study a three-stage tick population model with three development delays. Using the total delay τ as the bifurcation parameter, we conduct local and global Hopf bifurcation analysis. Especially, we examine the onset and termination of Hopf bifurcations of periodic solutions from the unique positive equilibrium. We locate all of the...

In recent decades much attention has been paid to polynomial Liénard systems. Cubic ones are such systems with a cubic restoring and quadratic damping; for example, the famous FitzHugh-Nagumo system can be transformed into a cubic Liénard system. For the three-parameter family of cubic Liénard systems, the case with a positive restoring leading coe...

Nonpharmaceutical interventions (NPIs), particularly contact tracing isolation and household quarantine, play a vital role in effectively bringing the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) under control in China. The pairwise model, has an inherent advantage in characterizing those two NPIs than the classical well-mixed models. Therefore, in this pap...

Objectives The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic expanded its geographic distribution through the movement of humans and caused subsequent local outbreaks. Hence, it is essential to investigate how human mobility and travel ban affect the transmission and spatial spread while minimizing the impact on social activities and national economics. Methods We dev...

Bistability is a ubiquitous phenomenon in life sciences. In this paper, two kinds of bistable structures in dynamical systems are studied: One is two one-point attractors, another is a one-point attractor accompanied by a cycle attractor. By the Conley index theory, we prove that there exist other isolated invariant sets besides the two attractors,...

Dengue virus is transmitted by Aedes mosquitoes, posing threat to people’s health and leading to great economic cost in many tropical and subtropical regions. We develop an ordinary differential equation model taking into account multiple strains of dengue virus. Using the model, we assess the effectiveness of human vaccination considering its wani...

The spread of SARS-CoV-2 through direct transmission (person-to-person) has been the focus of most studies on the dynamics of COVID-19. The efficacy of social distancing and mask usage at reducing the risk of direct transmission of COVID-19 has been studied by many researchers. Little or no attention is given to indirect transmission of the virus t...

Efforts to mitigate the COVID-19 pandemic have relied heavily on non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs), including physical distancing, hand hygiene, and mask-wearing. However, an effective vaccine is essential to containing the spread of the virus. The first doses were distributed at the end of 2020, but the efficacy, period of immunity it will p...

Background The closure of communities, including schools, has been adopted to control the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) epidemic in most countries. Operating schools safely during the pandemic requires a balance between health risks and the need for in-person learning. We use compartmental models to explore school reopening scenarios. Methods...

Since the outbreak of COVID-19 in Wuhan, China in December 2019, it has spread quickly and become a global pandemic. While the epidemic has been contained well in China due to unprecedented public health interventions, it is still raging or not yet been restrained in some neighboring countries. Chinese government adopted a strict policy of immigrat...

In order to investigate the effectiveness of lockdown and social distancing restrictions, which have been widely carried out as policy choice to curb the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic around the world, we formulate and discuss a staged and weighted network system based on a classical SEAIR epidemiological model. Five stages have been taken into conside...

In this study, we introduce a vulnerability index to measure the regional ASF epidemic and present the ASF severity ratings of the 31 provinces of mainland China. The index is defined based on the data from the investigation, national statistical yearbook and reports. The data to be used include pig breeding, financial resources, human resources, e...

Background In many parts of the world, restrictive non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPI) that aim to reduce contact rates, including stay-at-home orders, limitations on gatherings, and closure of public places, are being lifted, with the possibility that the epidemic resurges if alternative measures are not strong enough. Here we aim to capture th...

Background: Cystic echinococcosis is one of the most severe helminth zoonosis with a drastic impact on human health and livestock industry. Investigating optimal control strategy and assessing the crucial factors are essential for developing countermeasures to mitigate this disease. Methods: Two compartment models were formulated to study the dynam...

Background: Cystic echinococcosis is one of the most severe helminth zoonosis with a drastic impact on human health and livestock industry. Investigating optimal control strategy and assessing the crucial factors are essential for developing countermeasures to mitigate this disease. Methods: Two compartment models were formulated to study the dynam...

In order to investigate the effectiveness of lockdown and social distancing restrictions, which have been widely carried out as policy choice to curb the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic around the world, we formulate and discuss a staged and weighed networked system based on a classical SEAIR epidemiological model. Five stages have been taken into consid...

In this paper, we deal with Sel’kov model with saturation law which has been applied to numerous problems in chemistry and biology. We will study the stability of the unique constant steady state, existence and nonexistence of nonconstant steady states of such models. In particular, we prove that Turing pattern may occur when the saturation coeffic...

Zika virus, a reemerging mosquito-borne flavivirus, posed a global public health emergency in 2016. Brazil is the most seriously affected country. Some measures have been implemented to control the Zika transmission, such as spraying mosquitoes, developing vaccines and drugs. However, because of the limited medical resources (LMRs) in the country,...

Despite centuries of continuous efforts, mosquito-borne diseases (MBDs) remain enormous health threat of human life worldwide. Lately, the USA government has approved an innovative technology of releasing Wolbachia-infected male mosquitoes to suppress the wild mosquito population. In this paper we first introduce a stage-structured model for natura...

West Nile virus (WNv) transmission shows both seasonal pattern in every single year and cyclic pattern over years. In this paper we formulate a compartmental model with bird demographics and maturation time of mosquitoes during metamorphosis to study the impact of ambient temperature on the transmission and recurrence of disease. We show that avian...

Sustainable forest management requires the ability to accurately model forest dynamics under a changing environment, which is difficult using conventional statistical methods as many factors that interactively affect forest growth must be considered. As well, statistical model development is often limited by the lack of broad-scale repeated forest...

The ongoing Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic threatens the health of humans and causes great economic losses. Predictive modelling and forecasting the epidemic trends are essential for developing countermeasures to mitigate this pandemic. We develop a network model, where each node represents an individual and the edges represent contac...

The ongoing Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic threatens the health of humans and causes great economic losses. Predictive modelling and forecasting the epidemic trends are essential for developing countermeasures to mitigate this pandemic. We develop a network model, where each node represents an individual and the edges represent contac...

An easily accessible climate data portal, http://yorku.ca/ocdp, was developed and officially launched in 2018 to disseminate a super ensemble of high-resolution regional climate change projections for the province of Ontario, Canada. The spatial resolution is ~10 km × ~10 km and temporal resolution is one day, UTC. The data covers 120 years from 19...

The first case of Corona Virus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) was reported in Wuhan, China in December 2019. Since then, COVID-19 has quickly spread out to all provinces in China and over 150 countries or territories in the world. With the first level response to public health emergencies (FLRPHE) launched over the country, the outbreak of COVID-19 in Chi...

The ongoing outbreak of the novel coronavirus pneumonia (also known as COVID-19) has triggered a series of stringent control measures in China, such as city closure, traffic restrictions, contact tracing and household quarantine. These containment efforts often lead to changes in the contact pattern among individuals of the population. Many existin...

In this paper a mathematical model is formulated to study transmission dynamics of West Nile virus (WNv), which incorporates mosquito demographics including pair formation, metamorphic stages and intraspecific competition. The global behaviors of the model are obtained from a geometric approach and theory of monotone dynamics, even though bistabili...

BACKGROUND Empoasca onukii, the tea green leafhopper, is a key pest of tea whose control often requires the extensive use of insecticides. As a predator of the tea green leafhopper, the mite Anystis baccarum is a potential biological control agent worldwide, though little is known about how intercropping cover crops can impact its suppressing effec...

Early warning systems to predict infectious disease outbreaks have been identified as a key adaptive response to climate change. Warming, climate variability and extreme weather events associated with climate change are expected to drive an increase in frequency and intensity of mosquito-borne disease (MBD) outbreaks globally. In Canada, this will...

H7N9 virus in the environment plays a role in the dynamics of avian influenza A (H7N9). A nationwide poultry vaccination with H7N9 vaccine program was implemented in China in October of 2017. To analyze the effect of vaccination and environmental virus on the development of avian influenza A (H7N9), we establish an avian influenza A (H7N9) transmis...

We present and study a two-strain pairwise epidemic model with non-Markovian recovery process in which the recovery rate depends on infection age. The novel model is a hyperbolic system which can be transformed into a system of integro-differential equations by using the method of characteristics. For the two-strain pairwise model, the reproduction...

Tea is an economically important crop, consumed by billions of people. Despite the increasing market for pesticide-free products, the use of pesticide in tea is still high. In order to investigate whether intercropping promotes biological control organisms, Chamaecrista rotundifolia (Pers.) Greene, Indigofera hendecaphylla Jacq., Trifolium repens L...

Using the discrete Markov chain, in this paper we develop a stochastic model for algal bloom, in which white noise terms are introduced to describe the effects of environmental random fluctuations and time delay to account for the time needed in the conversion of detritus into nutrient. For the proposed model, we firstly discuss the well-posedness,...

This paper is concerned with a simplified epidemic model for West Nile virus in a heterogeneous time-periodic environment. By means of the model, we will explore the impact of spatial heterogeneity of environment and temporal periodicity on the persistence and eradication of West Nile virus. The free boundary is employed to represent the moving fro...

Mosquito trap counts are heavily influenced by environmental factors such as temperature and precipitation. However, some important geographic factors, such as land use and elevation of a particular site, are often either not recorded or simplify not observable. This is a major issue in building a predictive model for the mosquito trap counts over...

There has been a substantial amount of well mixing epidemic models devoted to characterizing the observed complex phenomena (such as bistability, hysteresis, oscillations, etc.) during the transmission of many infectious diseases. A comprehensive explanation of these phenomena by epidemic models on complex networks is still lacking. In this paper w...

A novel method for daily temperature and precipitation downscaling is proposed in this study which combines the Ensemble Optimal Interpolation (EnOI) and bias correction techniques. For downscaling temperature, the day to day seasonal cycle of high resolution temperature of the NCEP climate forecast system reanalysis (CFSR) is used as background st...

A reaction‐diffusion system with free boundary is proposed to describe the transmission of the dengue disease from mosquitoes to humans. In addition to the classical basic reproduction number R0, the spatial‐temporal basic reproduction number is introduced to determine the persistence and eradication of the disease. Some sufficient conditions for t...

A Filippov epidemic model is proposed to explore the impact of capacity and limited resources of public health system on the control of epidemic diseases. The number of infected cases is chosen as an index to represent a threshold policy, that is, the capacity dependent treatment policy is implemented when the case number exceeds a critical level,...

As vectors, mosquitoes transmit numerous mosquito-borne diseases. Among the many factors affecting the distribution and density of mosquitoes, climate change and warming have been increasingly recognized as major ones. In this paper, we make use of three diffusive logistic models with free boundary in one space dimension to explore the impact of cl...

Almost all population communities are strongly influenced by their seasonally varying living environments. We investigate the influence of seasons on populations via a periodically forced predator-prey system with a nonmonotonic functional response. We study four seasonality mechanisms via a continuation technique. When the natural death rate is pe...