Epidemic Spreading in Metapopulation Networks Coupled With Awareness Propagation

Understanding the feedback loop that links the spatiotemporal spread of infectious diseases and human behavior is an open problem. To study this problem, we develop a multiplex framework that couples epidemic spreading across subpopulations in a metapopulation network (i.e., physical layer) with the spreading of awareness about the epidemic in a communication network (i.e., virtual layer). We explicitly study the interactions between the mobility patterns across subpopulations and the awareness propagation among individuals. We analyze the coupled dynamics using microscopic Markov chains (MMCs) equations and validate the theoretical results via Monte Carlo (MC) simulations. We find that with the spreading of awareness, reducing human mobility becomes more effective in mitigating the large-scale epidemic. We also investigate the influence of varying topological features of the physical and virtual layers and the correlation between the connectivity and local population size per subpopulation. Overall the proposed modeling framework and findings contribute to the growing literature investigating the interplay between the spatiotemporal spread of epidemics and human behavior.