Leveraging Opinions and Vaccination to Eradicate Networked Epidemics

TL;DR

This paper presents a multi-layer network model integrating opinion dynamics and vaccination behavior to effectively eradicate epidemics, demonstrating that influencing opinions can lead to successful disease control.

Contribution

It introduces a novel multi-layer networked $SIRS-V_o$ model that links opinion dynamics with epidemic spread and vaccination, providing new insights into eradication strategies.

Findings

The model characterizes vaccination criteria based on opinion influence.

The proposed strategy stabilizes the epidemic around a healthy state.

Outbreaks rebound when control measures are relaxed.

Abstract

We introduce a multi-layer networked compartmental $SIRS-V_o$ model that captures opinion dynamics, disease spread, risk perception, and self-interest vaccine-uptake behavior in an epidemic process. We characterize the target vaccination criterion of the proposed model and conditions that guarantee the criterion is obtainable by influencing opinions on disease prevalence. We leverage this result to design an eradication strategy that leverages opinions and vaccination. Through numerical simulations, we show that the proposed eradication strategy is able to stabilize the epidemic process around a healthy state equilibrium, and the outbreak rebounds after the control signal is relaxed.