Unifying human infectious disease models and real-time awareness of population- and subpopulation-level intervention effectiveness

TL;DR

This paper explores how human behavior and awareness of intervention effectiveness during outbreaks can influence disease spread and outcomes.

Contribution

The study introduces a behavioral function into an SEIR model to capture how real-time awareness and opinions affect intervention adherence.

Findings

Model simulations showed that outbreak information awareness at different stages can reduce epidemic severity.

Incorporating behavioral heterogeneity improves understanding of adherence dynamics during outbreaks.

Behavioral functions in models can help decision-makers during infectious disease outbreaks.

Abstract

During infectious disease outbreaks, humans often base their decision to adhere to an intervention strategy on individual choices and opinions. However, due to data limitations and inference challenges, infectious disease models usually omit these variables. We constructed a compartmental, deterministic Susceptible-Exposed-Infectious-Recovered (SEIR) disease model that includes a behavioural function with parameters influencing intervention uptake. The behavioural function accounted for an initial subpopulation opinion towards an intervention, their outbreak information awareness sensitivity and the extent to which they are swayed by the real-time intervention effectiveness information. Applying the model to vaccination uptake and three human pathogens—pandemic influenza, SARS-CoV-2 and Ebola virus—we explored through model simulation how these intervention adherence decision parameters and behavioural heterogeneity impacted epidemiological outcomes. From our model simulations, we found that in some pathogen systems, different types of outbreak information awareness at different outbreak stages may be more informative to an information-sensitive population and may lead to less severe epidemic outcomes. Incorporating behavioural functions that modify infection control intervention adherence into epidemiological models can aid our understanding of adherence dynamics during outbreaks. Ultimately, by parameterizing models with what we know about human behaviour towards vaccination adherence, such models can help assist decision-makers during outbreaks.

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