Impact of information adoption and the resulted self-protective actions on epidemic spreading in awareness-disease coupled multiplex networks

During the awareness-epidemic coupled spreading process, the self-protective actions resulted from information adoption can help to change the actual infection rate. In this paper, a UAPU-SEIR model is proposed by incorporating the impacts of information adoption and the resulting self-protective actions on epidemic transmission. Motivated by information adoption which greatly affects individuals’ subsequent behaviors, a new state abbreviated as P is introduced into the traditional unaware-aware-unaware model to describe the preventive action taken state after information adoption. Importantly, the infection rate of P-state individuals is closely related to information adoption probability. The Microscopic Markov Chain Approach (MMCA) is used to theoretically analyze the presented model and derive the outbreak threshold of epidemic. Simulation results suggest that under small epidemic infection rate, the proposed model significantly suppresses epidemic spreading speed and size, and results in higher epidemic threshold. Whereas, greater information adoption rate is needed to inhibit epidemic dissemination for increased infection rate. Besides, under the impact of information adoption and the resulted self-protective behaviors, accelerating information diffusion is able to both inhibit epidemic transmission and raise epidemic threshold. Current findings provide us a better understanding for the prevention and controlling of real infectious disease. Graphical abstract