Abstract
Individual behavioral response to the spreading of an epidemic plays a crucial role in the progression of the epidemic itself. The risk perception induces individuals to adopt a protective behavior, as for instance reducing their social contacts, adopting more restrictive hygienic measures or undergoing prophylaxis procedures. In this paper, starting with a previously developed lattice-gas SIR model, we construct a coupled behavior-disease model for influenza spreading with spontaneous behavioral changes. The focus is on self-initiated behavioral changes that alter the susceptibility to the disease, without altering the contact patterns among individuals. Three different mechanisms of awareness spreading are analyzed: the local spreading due to the presence in the neighborhood of infective individuals; the global spreading due to the news published by the mass media and to educational campaigns implemented at institutional level; the local spreading occurring through the “thought contagion” among aware and unaware individuals. The peculiarity of the present approach is that the awareness spreading model is calibrated on available data on awareness and concern of the population about the risk of contagion. In particular, the model is validated against the A(H1N1) epidemic outbreak in Italy during the season, by making use of the awareness data gathered by the behavioral risk factor surveillance system (PASSI). We find that, increasing the accordance between the simulated awareness spreading and the PASSI data on risk perception, the agreement between simulated and experimental epidemiological data improves as well. Furthermore, we show that, within our model, the primary mechanism to reproduce a realistic evolution of the awareness during an epidemic, is the one due to globally available information. This result highlights how crucial is the role of mass media and educational campaigns in influencing the epidemic spreading of infectious diseases.
Highlights
Understanding the way people interact with each other is one of the key ingredients for the comprehension of the epidemic spreading process
As in Ref [26], the simulations are initialized with a density of infected individuals, randomly distributed on the lattice, which is equal to the 5% of the density of influenza-like illness (ILI) cases observed at 43th week during the A(H1N1) pandemic in Italy
We propose a very simple model for the epidemic spreading in an age-structured population with dynamic contacts and human behavioral changes
Summary
Understanding the way people interact with each other is one of the key ingredients for the comprehension of the epidemic spreading process. Susceptible individuals, which become aware of the risk of infection, adopt a protective behavior in order to reduce the risk of contagion (increased hygienic measures, use of face masks, etc), which may alter the type but not the number of contacts.
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