Epidemics on networks: Reducing disease transmission using health emergency declarations and peer communication

Azizi, Asma; Montalvo, Cesar; Espinoza, Baltazar; Kang, Yun; Castillo-Chavez, Carlos

The presence and spread of awareness are coupled to the presence of infection, with awareness spreading, by design, after the infection reaches the level P Ã . Therefore, there is a time-lag between starting time of infection and awareness spread. What should the value of P Ã be, if the goal is to reduce the final epidemic size? When the infection disperses fast-high basic reproduction number-people must be informed immediately, or the policy will have no effect. As noted, there is no threshold condition for G S network. We did not derive expressions for epidemic thresholds. Instead, we used epidemic take-offs to estimate the basic reproduction number as R 0 ¼ 1:8 and 2.01, numbers corresponding to G E and G S , respectively. Numbers that are not too high-such as that of the R 0 for measles (Keeling & Rohani, 2011)-we are giving awareness a chance to be effective, since an epidemic with low R 0 will reach the value P Ã much slower.