Role of Media and Effects of Infodemics and Escapes in the Spatial Spread of Epidemics: A Stochastic Multi-Region Model with Optimal Control Approach

Abstract

Mass vaccination campaigns play major roles in the war against epidemics. Such prevention strategies cannot always reach their goals significantly without the help of media and awareness campaigns used to prevent contacts between susceptible and infected people. Feelings of fear, infodemics, and misconception could lead to some fluctuations of such policies. In addition to the vaccination strategy, the movement restriction approach is essential because of the factor of mobility or travel. However, anti-epidemic border measures may also be disturbed if some infected travelers manage to escape and infiltrate into a safer region. In this paper, we aim to study infection dynamics related to the spatial spread of an epidemic in interconnected regions in the presence of random perturbations caused by the three above-mentioned reasons. Therefore, we devise a stochastic multi-region epidemic model in which contacts between susceptible and infected populations, vaccination-based and movement restriction optimal control approaches are all assumed to be unpredictable, and then, we discuss the effectiveness of such policies. In order to reach our goal, we employ a stochastic maximum principle version for noised systems, state and prove the sufficient and necessary conditions of optimality, and finally provide the numerical results obtained using a stochastic progressive-regressive schemes method.

Autopsy of a metaphor: The origins, use and blind spots of the ‘infodemic’

“…Public health emergencies have long been accompanied by rumours and a deluge of information of varying quality about their origins and spread as well as interventions against them (Stalcup, 2020). Medical misinformation, particularly in these contexts, is known for having multiple short- and long-term consequences, and both its presence and its correction can often have systemic effects (Southwell et al, 2018, 2019). The term – or more specifically, the metaphor – ‘infodemic’ to describe some of these, however, was not coined until 2003 when political analyst David J Rothkopf (2003) first used it in a commentary for the Washington Post in the context of the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) outbreak.…”

Optimal Impulse Vaccination Approach for an SIR Control Model with Short-Term Immunity

“…The problem as mentioned in [7], is that we cannot be sure that the infection will not appear again since in practice, it is nearly impossible to vaccinate most susceptible individuals of a population because not all people would come to be vaccinated and not all vaccinations are successful [7,[38][39][40]. In the same context, El Kihal et al discussed other possible reasons such as the constraint of limited resources as in [38] or infodemics as in [53]. Thus, a better way to avoid the recurrence of a disease outbreaks, is to follow a control strategy based on pulsed vaccinations.…”

Symbiosis Evolution of Science Communication Ecosystem Based on Social Media: A Lotka–Volterra Model‐Based Simulation

“…e communication between scientists and the public is changing as we enter the information age. It is a fact of mass communication effect research that exposure is a necessary condition for media effect and that communication activities often fail due to insufficient exposure [1]. e rapid development of new media, such as social media, has brought tremendous changes to the technological environment of science communication [2].…”