The impact of awareness diffusion on the spread of COVID-19 based on a two-layer SEIR/V-UA epidemic model

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a new susceptible-vaccinated-exposed-infected-recovered with unaware-aware (SEIR/V-UA) model to study the mutual effect between the epidemic spreading and information diffusion. We investigate the dynamic processes of the model with a Kinetic equation and derive the expression for epidemic stability by the eigenvalues of the Jacobian matrix. Then, we validate the model by the Monte Carlo method and numerical simulation on a two-layer scale-free network. With the outbreak of COVID-19, the spread of the epidemic in China prompted drastic measures for transmission containment. We examine the effects of these interventions based on modeling of the information-epidemic and the data of the COVID-19 epidemic case. The results further demonstrate that the epidemic spread can be affected by the effective transmission rate of awareness.

Keywords: SEIR/V-UA model; awareness diffusion; epidemic spreading; multiplex networks.