New paper just published.
When a pandemic occurs, a hard lockdown is an obvious and effective way to stop it. However, lockdowns come with serious societal issues. For example, during COVID-19, a critical mass of people opposing lockdowns coalesced in Britain. This was mainly due to two demographic groups, namely self-employed people, who were concerned about their own economic losses, and parents, who dreaded the prospect of having to be closed in the same home with their own kids. Seeking validation and trying to promote their own personal interests, these people became main spreaders of disinformation, eventually falling prey of state-sponsored populistic and anti-science propaganda machines.
In this study, we show that one can use optimization and control theory to introduce only light travel restrictions between macroareas, such as states or regions within a country, yielding better final results in terms of infections and economic damage than those that were actually obtained at the time.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960077925002243
