Wesley Cota

University of São Paulo | USP · Instituto de Medicina Tropical de São Paulo (IMT) (FM) (São Paulo)

Numerical simulation of continuous-time Markovian processes is an essential and widely applied tool in the investigation of epidemic spreading on complex networks. Due to the high heterogeneity of the connectivity structure through which epidemics is transmitted, efficient and accurate implementations of generic epidemic processes are not trivial a...

Echo chambers in online social networks, in which users prefer to interact only with ideologically-aligned peers, are believed to facilitate misinformation spreading and contribute to radicalize political discourse. In this paper, we gauge the effects of echo chambers in information spreading phenomena over political communication networks. Mining...

A central feature of an emerging infectious disease in a pandemic scenario is the spread through geographical scales and the impacts on different locations according to the adopted mitigation protocols. We investigated a stochastic epidemic model with the metapopulation approach in which patches represent municipalities. Contagion follows a stochas...

Human mobility, contact patterns, and their interplay are key aspects of our social behavior that shape the spread of infectious diseases across different regions. In the light of new evidence and data sets about these two elements, epidemic models should be refined to incorporate both the heterogeneity of human contacts and the complexity of mobil...

On 31 December, 2019, an outbreak of a novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, that causes the COVID-19 disease, was first reported in Hubei, mainland China. This epidemics’ health threat is probably one of the biggest challenges faced by our interconnected modern societies. According to the epidemiological reports, the large basic reproduction number R0∼3....

Nowcasting and forecasting of epidemic spreading rely on incidence series of reported cases to derive the fundamental epidemiological parameters for a given pathogen. Two relevant drawbacks for predictions are the unknown fractions of undocumented cases and levels of nonpharmacological interventions, which span highly heterogeneously across differe...

Government inaction on COVID-19 vaccines contributes to the persistence of childism in Brazil

Effective strategies of vaccine prioritization are essential to mitigate the impacts of severe infectious diseases. We investigate the role of infection fatality ratio (IFR) and social contact matrices on vaccination prioritization using a compartmental epidemic model fueled by real-world data of different diseases and countries. Our study confirms...

The spatiotemporal propagation patterns of recent infectious diseases, originated as localized epidemic outbreaks and eventually becoming global pandemics, are highly influenced by human mobility. Case exportation from endemic areas to the rest of the countries has become unavoidable because of the striking growth of the global mobility network, he...

Nowcasting and forecasting of epidemic spreading, fundamental support for policy makers' decisions, rely on incidence series of reported cases to derive the fundamental epidemiological parameters. Two relevant drawbacks for predictions are the unknown fraction of undocumented cases and levels of nonpharmacological interventions that span highly het...

Effective strategies of vaccine prioritization are essential to mitigate the impacts of severe infectious diseases. We investigate the role of infection fatality ratio (IFR) and social contact matrices on vaccination prioritization using a compartmental epidemic model fueled by real-world data of different diseases (COVID-19 and influenza) and coun...

Human mobility, contact patterns, and their interplay are key aspects of our social behavior that shape the spread of infectious diseases across different regions. In the light of new evidence and data sets about these two elements, epidemic models should be refined to incorporate both the heterogeneity of human contacts and the complexity of mobil...

A central feature of an emerging infectious disease in a pandemic scenario is the spread through geographical scales and the impacts on different locations according to the adopted mitigation protocols. We investigated a stochastic epidemic model with the metapopulation approach in which patches represent municipalities. Contagion follows a stochas...

Epidemic spreading has been one of the most prominent and widely investigated issues in the recent literature of complex networks. Despite several advances, the mathematical modeling of spreading processes remains the target of intensive investigations. In this thesis, we initially focused on the fundamental aspects of these dynamical processes on...

Since the first case of COVID-19 was confirmed in Brazil on 19 February 2020, this epidemic has spread throughout all states and at least 2142 of 5570 municipalities up to 30 April 2020. In order to understand this spreading, we investigate a stochastic epidemic model using a metapopulation approach. Simulations are supplied with real data for mobi...

We present a dataset containing the reported number of COVID-19 cases and deaths at municipal and federative units level in Brazil. Data is aggregated daily from official sources with the most updated numbers, providing a reliable, free and simple resource for researchers, health authorities and general public. Interactive pages in English and Port...

The spread of COVID-19 is posing an unprecedented threat to health systems worldwide[1]. The fast propagation of the disease combined with the existence of covert contagions by asymptomatic individuals make the controlling of this disease particularly challenging. The key parameter to track the progression of the epidemics is the effective reproduc...

An outbreak of a novel coronavirus, named SARS-CoV-2, that provokes the COVID-19 disease, was first reported in Hubei, mainland China on 31 December 2019. As of 20 March 2020, cases have been reported in 166 countries/regions, including cases of human-to-human transmission around the world. The proportions of this epidemics is probably one of the l...

Abstract Echo chambers in online social networks, in which users prefer to interact only with ideologically-aligned peers, are believed to facilitate misinformation spreading and contribute to radicalize political discourse. In this paper, we gauge the effects of echo chambers in information spreading phenomena over political communication networks...

We present a comparison between stochastic simulations and mean-field theories for the epidemic threshold of the susceptible-infected-susceptible (SIS) model on correlated networks (both assortative and disassortative) with power-law degree distribution $P(k)\sim k^{-\gamma}$. We confirm the vanishing of the threshold regardless of the correlation...

We present a comparison between stochastic simulations and mean-field theories for the epidemic threshold of the susceptible-infected-susceptible (SIS) model on correlated networks (both assortative and disassortative) with power-law degree distribution $P(k)\sim k^{-\gamma}$. We confirm the vanishing of the threshold regardless of the correlation...

Tutorial for the Winter Workshop on Complex Systems 2019 in Zakopane, Poland.

We analyze two alterations of the standard SIS dynamics that preserve the central properties of spontaneous healing and infection capacity of a vertex increasing unlimitedly with its degree. The modified models have the same epidemic thresholds of the original dynamics in both heterogeneous and quenched mean-field theories. However, depending on th...

Griffiths phases (GPs), generated by the heterogeneities on modular networks, have recently been suggested to provide a mechanism, rid of fine parameter tuning, to explain the critical behavior of complex systems. One conjectured requirement for systems with modular structures was that the network of modules must be hierarchically organized and pos...

We analyze two alterations of the susceptible-infected-susceptible (SIS) model that preserve its central properties of spontaneous healing and infection capacity increasing unlimitedly. The epidemic thresholds are the same of the original dynamics in heterogeneous (HMF) and quenched (QMF) mean-field theories. Simulations yield a dual scenario, in w...

Many critical phenomena are drastically altered by quenched disorder, leading to Griffiths phases (GPs). In the GPs, there is dynamical criticality and high sensitivity to external stimuli in an extended parameter space. It was conjectured that systems with modular structures can sustain GPs if they are hierarchically organized and possess finite d...

Conference poster

Este trabalho tem como objetivo fazer uma revisão sobre topologias de redes e processos de propagação de epidemias, e também propor algoritmos de simulação eficientes para contribuir para o estudo de fenômenos ubíquos no mundo contemporâneo. Monografia apresentada ao Departamento de Física da Universidade Federal de Viçosa como parte das exigência...

We provide numerical evidence for slow dynamics of the susceptible-infected-susceptible model evolving on finite-size random networks with power-law degree distributions. Extensive simulations were done by averaging the activity density over many realizations of networks. We investigated the effects of outliers in both highly fluctuating (natural c...