Abstract
The outbreaks of the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) epidemic in 2003 resulted in unprecedented impacts on people's daily life. One of the most significant impacts to people is the fear of contacting the SARS virus while engaging daily routine activity. Here we use data from daily underground ridership in Taipei City and daily reported new SARS cases in Taiwan to model the dynamics of the public fear of the SARS virus during the wax and wane of the SARS period. We found that for each reported new SARS case there is an immediate loss of about 1200 underground ridership (the fresh fear). These daily loss rates dissipate to the following days with an e-folding time of about 28 days, reflecting the public perception on the risk of contacting SARS virus when traveling with the underground system (the residual fear). About 50% of daily ridership was lost during the peak of the 2003 SARS period, compared with the loss of 80% daily ridership during the closure of the underground system after Typhoon Nari, the loss of 50–70% ridership due to the closure of the governmental offices and schools during typhoon periods, and the loss of 60% daily ridership during Chinese New Year holidays.
Highlights
The 2003 severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) epidemic is a recent vivid example, demonstrating the deep impact that a deadly virus can have on a society
The daily underground ridership can be modeled by the statistical average daily ridership (p) of each year, indicating that the underground usage during normal days are very regular
We note that a big drop of ridership during the days 241–271 in 2001 is due to the closure of two main lines of the underground system, which was flooded by the severe rainfall during the passing of Typhoon Nari [18]
Summary
The 2003 SARS epidemic is a recent vivid example, demonstrating the deep impact that a deadly virus can have on a society. Previous works studied the dynamics of the daily accumulated infected cases during the SARS outbreaks in Beijing, Canada, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan [11,13,14] respectively. 2. Daily Reported SARS Cases Data After the first SARS case was confirmed on 14 Mar 2003, Taiwan moved aggressively to isolate all suspected or probable case-patients in negative-pressure rooms in hospitals [8]. 4. A Model for Fresh Fear and Residual Fear In order to model the daily variations of fear of the underground ridership with respect to the daily reported SARS cases, a dynamical model was developed to simulate day-to-day variations of the underground ridership in the periods before, during, and after the SARS epidemics. At any day i, the total fear Fi is a summation of a fresh fear foi plus the residual fears fri from previous days, Fi ~foi zfri ð7Þ
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