Re-Thinking the Role of Government Information Intervention in the COVID-19 Pandemic: An Agent-Based Modeling Analysis.

Yao Lu,Xiaoqi Zhang,Yanqiao Zheng,Zheng Ji,Han Liang

doi:10.3390/ijerph18010147

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic imposes new challenges on the capability of governments in intervening with the information dissemination and reducing the risk of infection outbreak. To reveal the complexity behind government intervention decision, we build a bi-layer network diffusion model for the information-disease dynamics that were intervened in and conduct a full space simulation to illustrate the trade-off faced by governments between information disclosing and blocking. The simulation results show that governments prioritize the accuracy of disclosed information over the disclosing speed when there is a high-level medical recognition of the virus and a high public health awareness, while, for the opposite situation, more strict information blocking is preferred. Furthermore, an unaccountable government tends to delay disclosing, a risk-averse government prefers a total blocking, and a low government credibility will discount the effect of information disclosing and aggravate the situation. These findings suggest that information intervention is indispensable for containing the outbreak of infectious disease, but its effectiveness depends on a complicated way on both external social/epidemic factors and the governments’ internal preferences and governance capability, for which more thorough investigations are needed in the future.

Highlights

The COVID-19 pandemic has attacked the whole world over the past few months.The key features of the Novel Coronavirus, such as long incubation period, high infectiousness, and asymptomatic transmission, were not perceived at the beginning until they were gradually unveiled [1,2,3,4]
Behaviors into the epidemic model and conduct a simulation to reveal the information intervention dilemma faced by the government between information disclosing and blocking
We find that governments face a trade-off between speed and accuracy in information disclosing; and the optimal strategy is contingent on varying conditions in information blocking

Summary

Introduction

The COVID-19 pandemic has attacked the whole world over the past few months.The key features of the Novel Coronavirus, such as long incubation period, high infectiousness, and asymptomatic transmission, were not perceived at the beginning until they were gradually unveiled [1,2,3,4]. NO” (quoted from Scott Atlas, the White House coronavirus task force member), “This is a flu. The WHO and governments keep disclosing epidemic information, but the disclosure is based on their own endowments, preferences, and perceptions, resulting in misleading information at least in the early stage of COVID-19 outbreak, such as “Masks work? This is like a flu” (quoted from Donald Trump, the president of the US), and “There is some immune system variation with Asian people”(quoted form. Taro Aso, the Deputy Prime Minister of Japan), etc. This information failed to alert the public but let their guards down instead. In the real world, speed entails inaccuracy and cognitive uncertainty that keep government away from accomplishing such

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