Effects of the Order of Awareness Diffusion and Disease Propagation on the Spreading Dynamics

Abstract

Recently, studies on the interaction between disease transmission and awareness transmission based on two-layer networks have attracted much attention. Within such a framework, infectious disease is propagated through physical contact networks, while the diffusion of awareness is transmitted through virtual contact network. Moreover, the nodes on two layers are the same, but the edges connecting nodes in the two layers are different. Most of the existing models assume that the diffusion of awareness precedes the spread of disease (hereinafter referred to as ordered model). In real cases, it is difficult to distinguish the order of disease transmission from that of awareness diffusion, thus, this paper proposes a model without considering the order of two spreading processions (concurrent model for short). We find that the two models yield the same epidemic threshold, but have different influence on the spreading sizes. When the transmission rate of awareness is low, the epidemic size of concurrent model is smaller than that of ordered model. However, with the increase of the transmission rate of awareness, the result is reversed, that is, the epidemic size of the concurrent model is larger than that of ordered model.