Infection dynamics in structured populations with disease awareness based on neighborhood contact history

Abstract

In recent years, continuing efforts have been directed to revealing the effect of humanbehavioral responses in the spread of infectious diseases. In this paper, we propose animplementation mechanism of disease awareness via individual self-perception fromneighborhood contact histories (NCHs), where each individual is capable of memorizing asequence of his infectious contacts earlier time, and adaptively adjusting the contactrate with his neighboring individuals as a preventive strategy from risks of exposure toinfection. Both analytical and numerical results show that the NCH-based self-perceivedawareness is a simple, but efficient disease control measure, which can greatly reduce theoutbreak size of infectious diseases. We further examine the effects of a centralizeddisease control measure, which corresponds, for comparison, to an NCH-independent anduniformly aroused disease awareness. We find our proposed strategy outperforms thecentralized one in a much larger and more practical range of epidemiological parameters,which also highlight the importance of the NCH-based awareness information in guidance ofthe individual protective behavior against infectious diseases.