How disease risk awareness modulates transmission: coupling infectious disease models with behavioural dynamics

  1. Jaime Cascante-Vega
  2. Samuel Torres-Florez
  3. Juan Cordovez
  4. Mauricio Santos-Vega

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Abstract

Epidemiological models often assume that individuals do not change their behaviour or that those aspects are implicitly incorporated in parameters in the models. Typically, these assumptions are included in the contact rate between infectious and susceptible individuals. However, adaptive behaviours are expected to emerge and play an important role in the transmission dynamics across populations. Here, we propose a theoretical framework to couple transmission dynamics with behavioural dynamics due to infection awareness. We modelled the dynamics of social behaviour using a game theory framework, which is then coupled with an epidemiological model that captures the disease dynamics by assuming that individuals are aware of the actual epidemiological state to reduce their contacts. Results from the mechanistic model show that as individuals increase their awareness, the steady-state value of the final fraction of infected individuals in a susceptible-infected-susceptible (SIS) model decreases. We also incorporate theoretical contact networks, having the awareness parameter dependent on global or local contacts. Results show that even when individuals increase their awareness of the disease, the spatial structure itself defines the steady state.

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  1. Version published to 10.1098/rsos.210803
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    SciScore for 10.1101/2021.04.13.21255395: (What is this?)

    Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.

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    NIH rigor criteria are not applicable to paper type.

    Table 2: Resources

    No key resources detected.

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    • No protocol registration statement was detected.

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  3. Version published to 10.1101/2021.04.13.21255395v1 on medRxiv