More than just infections spread when an epidemic occurs. Information about the disease, how to spot it, and how to prevent it from spreading quickly among people in affected areas are all part of the process. The interplay between the course of epidemics and the dissemination of information to the public is relatively unknown.
To understand how reliable information can be better disseminated during epidemics, a model was developed by a pair of researchers. According to Chaos, a two-layer model can predict the effects of mass media on the threshold of an epidemic.
Epidemics have spread all over the world. The mass media had an effect on the people's attitudes towards epidemic prevention. The aim is to find out how these factors affect the propagation of the epidemic.
The researchers compared the interactions between two layers of information. The disease can be transmitted through physical contact. Positive and negative information is shared in the information space of social networks, which is where the do's and don'ts of infection prevention are discussed.
A set of equations can be used to calculate the epidemic threshold.
There is a time delay between infections and recovery. The longer it takes for a patient to recover from an illness, the less likely it is that they will be cured.
Disseminating effective prevention practices and using mass media can make it harder for the infection to spread. Reduction of time delays related to recovery boost recovery rates.
The biggest challenge in our work is how to analyze the impact of positive and negative information on the recovery rate and epidemic prevalence at the same time. It's not always possible to increase the communication rate of mass media in order to improve the recovery rate.
The work will hopefully inspire others to use high-level mathematics. Population mobility and vaccination will be analyzed next.
The article "The impact of positive and negative information on SIR-like epidemics in delayed multiplex networks" was written by two people. The article is going to be published in Chaos.
There is more information on the impact of positive and negative information on SIR epidemics. The DOI is 10.1063.
Journal information: Chaos
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