arXiv subjects

Jacques Haiech

Publications and source records attributed to Jacques Haiech.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2023

At the crossroads of epidemiology and biology: bridging the gap between SARS-CoV-2 viral strain properties and epidemic wave characteristics

The COVID-19 pandemic has given rise to numerous articles from different scientific fields (epidemiology, virology, immunology, airflow physics...) without any effort to link these different insights. In this review, we aim to establish relationships between epidemiological data and the characteristics of the virus strain responsible for the epidemic wave concerned. We have carried out this study on the Wuhan, Alpha, Delta and Omicron strains allowing us to illustrate the evolution of the relationships we have highlighted according to these different viral strains. We addressed the following questions: 1) How can the mean infectious dose (one quantum, by definition in epidemiology) be measured and expressed as an amount of viral RNA molecules (in genome units, GU) or as a number of replicative viral particles (in plaque-forming units, PFU)? 2) How many infectious quanta are exhaled by an infected person per unit of time? 3) How many infectious quanta are exhaled, on average, integrated over the whole contagious period? 4) How do these quantities relate to the epidemic reproduction rate R as measured in epidemiology, and to the viral load, as measured by molecular biological methods? 5) How has the infectious dose evolved with the different strains of SARS-CoV-2? We make use of state-of-the-art modelling, reviewed and explained in the appendix of the article (Supplemental Information, SI), to answer these questions using data from the literature in both epidemiology and virology. We have considered the modification of these relationships according to the vaccination status of the population. We hope that this work will allow a better integration of data from different fields (virology, epidemiology, and immunology) to anticipate the evolution of the epidemic in the case of COVID-19, but also in respiratory pathologies transmissible in an airborne manner.

q-bio.PE↗

arXiv2022

Risk assessment for long and short range airborne transmission of SARS-CoV-2, indoors and outdoors

Preventive measures to reduce infection are needed to combat the COVID-19 pandemic and prepare for a possible endemic phase. Current prophylactic vaccines are highly effective to prevent disease but lose their ability to reduce viral transmission as viral evolution leads to increasing immune escape. Long term proactive public health policies must therefore complement vaccination with available nonpharmaceutical interventions (NPI) aiming to reduce the viral transmission risk in public spaces. Here, we revisit the quantitative assessment of airborne transmission risk, considering asymptotic limits that considerably simplify its expression. We show that the aerosol transmission risk is the product of three factors: a biological factor that depends on the viral strain, a hydrodynamical factor defined as the ratio of concentration in viral particles between inhaled and exhaled air, and a face mask filtering factor. The short range contribution to the risk, both present indoors and outdoors, is related to the turbulent dispersion of exhaled aerosols by air drafts and by convection (indoor), or by the wind (outdoors). We show experimentally that airborne droplets and CO$_2$ molecules present the same dispersion. As a consequence, the dilution factor, and therefore the risk, can be measured quantitatively using the CO$_2$ concentration, regardless of the room volume, the flow rate of fresh air and the occupancy. We show that the dispersion cone leads to a concentration in viral particles, and therefore a short range transmission risk, inversely proportional to the squared distance to an infected person and to the flow velocity. The aerosolization criterion derived as an intermediate result, which compares the Stokes relaxation time to the Lagrangian time scale, may find application for a broad class of aerosol-borne pathogens and pollutants.

physics.soc-ph↗

arXiv2019

Using Data Mining to Explore Calmodulin Bibliography

In this chapter, we present a strategy and the technics to approach a scientific field from a set of articles gathered from the bibliographic database, Web of Science. The strategy is based on methods developed to analyze social networks. We illustrate the use of such strategy in studying the calmodulin field. Such method allows to structure a huge number of articles when writing a review, to detect the key opinion leaders in a given field and to locate his own research topic in the landscape of the themes deciphered by our own community. We show that the free software VosViewer may be used without knowledge in computing science and with a short learning period. iii.

q-bio.QM↗