Modeling the effects of prosocial awareness on COVID-19 dynamics: A case study on Colombia

TL;DR

This paper develops a mathematical model incorporating prosocial awareness to understand COVID-19 dynamics in Colombia, showing that awareness significantly impacts disease spread and can effectively flatten the curve.

Contribution

It introduces a novel COVID-19 model that integrates prosocial awareness effects and analyzes its stability and impact using real Colombian data.

Findings

Awareness significantly reduces transmission rates.

The model's predictions align well with Colombian case data.

Prosocial awareness can effectively flatten the epidemic curve.

Abstract

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has affected most of the countries on Earth. It has become a pandemic outbreak with more than 24 million confirmed infections and above 840 thousand deaths worldwide. In this study, we consider a mathematical model on COVID-19 transmission with the prosocial awareness effect. The proposed model can have four equilibrium states based on different parametric conditions. The local and global stability conditions for awareness free, disease-free equilibrium is studied. Using Lyapunov function theory and LaSalle Invariance Principle, the disease-free equilibrium is shown globally asymptotically stable under some parametric constraints. The existence of unique awareness free, endemic equilibrium and unique endemic equilibrium is presented. We calibrate our proposed model parameters to fit daily cases and deaths from Colombia. Sensitivity analysis indicates that the transmission rate and learning factor related to awareness of susceptibles are very crucial for reduction in disease related deaths. Finally, we assess the impact of prosocial awareness during the outbreak and compare this strategy with popular control measures. Results indicate that prosocial awareness has competitive potential to flatten the curve.