Epidemic-induced local awareness behavior inferred from surveys and genetic sequence data

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel method using genetic sequence data to quantify local awareness behavior during epidemics, validated through simulations and real-world data, revealing insights into behavioral responses during COVID-19.

Contribution

It presents an innovative approach to measure local awareness via mutation patterns in genetic data, linking it to policy and behavioral changes during pandemics.

Findings

Containment score correlates with policy stringency.

Drop in containment score during Omicron wave.

Genetic data can effectively infer awareness behavior.

Abstract

Behavior-disease models suggest that pandemics can be contained cost-effectively if individuals take preventive actions when disease prevalence rises among their close contacts. However, assessing local awareness behavior in real-world datasets remains a challenge. Through the analysis of mutation patterns in clinical genetic sequence data, we propose an efficient approach to quantify the impact of local awareness by identifying superspreading events and assigning containment scores to them. We validate the proposed containment score as a proxy for local awareness in simulation experiments, and find that it was correlated positively with policy stringency during the COVID-19 pandemic. Finally, we observe a temporary drop in the containment score during the Omicron wave in the United Kingdom, matching a survey experiment we carried out in Hungary during the corresponding period of the pandemic. Our findings bring important insight into the field of awareness modeling through the analysis of large-scale genetic sequence data, one of the most promising data sources in epidemics research.