Dynamics of Infectious Diseases: Local Versus Global Awareness

Abstract

Public awareness programs may deeply influence the epidemic pattern of a contagious disease by altering people’s perception of risk and individuals behavior during the course of the epidemic outbreak. Regardless of the veracity, social media advertisements are expected to execute an increasingly prominent role in the field of infectious disease modeling. In this paper, we propose a model which portrays the interplay between dissemination of awareness at local and global levels, and prevalence of disease. Our sensitivity results determine the correlations between some epidemiologically important parameters and disease prevalence. The growth rate of broadcasting information through social media is found to destabilize the system through limit cycle oscillations whereas the baseline number of social media advertisements stabilize the system by terminating persistent oscillations. The system first undergoes supercritical Hopf-bifurcation and then subcritical Hopf-bifurcation on gradual increase in dissemination rate of awareness at local/global level. Moreover, the disease is eradicated if the dissemination rates of awareness and baseline number of social media advertisements are too large. We also study the effect of seasonal variation of the growth rate of social media advertisements. Our nonautonomous system generates globally attractive positive periodic solution if the growth rate of social media advertisements lies between certain ranges. However, the global attractivity is affected on enhancement in growth rate of social media advertisements and three-periodic solution is observed. Our findings show that baseline number of social media advertisements and dissemination of awareness at individual as well as community levels play a tremendous role in eliminating the burden of disease. Furthermore, a comparison of the effects of local and global awareness reveals that the latter is more effective in curtailing the disease. We believe these findings may be beneficial to understand the contagion characteristics of real epidemics and help to adopt suitable precautionary measures in the form of nonpharmaceutical interventions.