Impact of Dynamic Infection Rate and Self-Isolation Awareness onNetworked Epidemic Propagation

Abstract

In the past decades, numerous models have been proposed in epidemic modeling. However, few of them describe the dynamic variation process of the infection rates, and the impact of infected individuals' safety awareness on epidemic spreading has also been rarely studied. Therefore, we propose a novel epidemic spreading model with dynamic infection rates (DIR) and self-isolation awareness (SIA) in this paper. The DIR describes the variation in infection rates over time, and the SIA denotes the infected individuals' safety awareness. We suggest that both DIR and SIA can suppress the spread of the epidemic, and SIA has a greater impact on the peak infection and the time to peak infection compared with DIR, while DIR plays a critical role in eradicating the epidemic. Additionally, the higher the intensity of SIA, the lower the peak infection and the stationary infection density. As the intensity of SIA increases, its inhibitory effect on the peak infection exhibits a marginal effect. Furthermore, when considering different epidemic models with DIR and SIA, simulation results indicate that the infection density distribution is similar, but the corresponding infection density values vary significantly.