Publications by authors named "James Soda"
Article Synopsis
- Emerging infectious diseases (EIDs) like COVID-19 can seriously affect colleges where many students live closely together and mix with different groups.
- Quinnipiac University took steps to handle COVID-19 by putting rules in place, like wearing masks, testing students regularly, and using an app to monitor symptoms.
- Despite these efforts, a large gathering led to a serious outbreak, showing that both student behavior and the health situation in the surrounding community greatly affected how the virus spread.
In recent decades, there has been an increased interest in developing a vaccine for chikungunya. However, due to its unpredictable transmission, planning for a chikungunya vaccine trial is challenging. To inform decision making on the selection of sites for a vaccine efficacy trial, we developed a new framework for projecting the expected number of endpoint events at a given site.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSeveral hundred thousand Zika cases have been reported across the Americas since 2015. Incidence of infection was likely much higher, however, due to a high frequency of asymptomatic infection and other challenges that surveillance systems faced. Using a hierarchical Bayesian model with empirically-informed priors, we leveraged multiple types of Zika case data from 15 countries to estimate subnational reporting probabilities and infection attack rates (IARs).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Mathematical models of transmission dynamics are routinely fitted to epidemiological time series, which must inevitably be aggregated at some spatial scale. Weekly case reports of chikungunya have been made available nationally for numerous countries in the Western Hemisphere since late 2013, and numerous models have made use of this data set for forecasting and inferential purposes. Motivated by an abundance of literature suggesting that the transmission of this mosquito-borne pathogen is localized at scales much finer than nationally, we fitted models at three different spatial scales to weekly case reports from Colombia to explore limitations of analyses of nationally aggregated time series data.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: We sought to characterize dengue virus (DENV) infections among febrile children enrolled in a pediatric cohort study who were clinically diagnosed with a non-dengue illness ("C cases").
Methods: DENV infections were detected and viral load quantitated by real-time reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction in C cases presenting between January 2007 and January 2013.
Results: One hundred forty-one of 2892 C cases (4.
Background: Zika virus (ZIKV), chikungunya virus (CHIKV), and dengue virus (DENV) cocirculate in Nicaragua. In this study, we sought to compare the quantified viremia and clinical presentation of patients infected with 1 or more of these viruses.
Methods: Acute-phase serum samples from 346 patients with a suspected arboviral illness were tested using a multiplex real-time reverse-transcription polymerase chain reaction for ZIKV, CHIKV, and DENV.