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

Zhao, Xueke; Zhou, Qingming; Wang, Anjing; Zhu, Fenping; Meng, Zeyang; Zuo, Chao

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.