Stay at Home, Wash Your Hands: Epidemic Dynamics with Awareness of Infection

Abstract

This paper describes work in progress studying a cellular automata model of epidemic dynamics on a spatial network. We assume that susceptible individuals become aware of the presence of infection within their local neighbourhood, and change their behavior so as to reduce the risk of becoming infected. Two controls are considered: reducing the number of contacts ("staying at home"), and reducing the likelihood that contact results in infection ("washing hands"). We consider how effective these controls are at reducing the final size of the epidemic and give some preliminary results obtained by running simulations on a spatial lattice. One result is that "washing hands" appears more effective for short-lived diseases while "staying at home" is better for diseases with a longer infectious period. Another result is that control seems to be most effective when the awareness neighbourhood is roughly the same size or larger than the contact neighbourhood. We also give a non-spatial mean field approximation and compare results from both models.