Re-Thinking the Role of Government Information Intervention in the COVID-19 Pandemic: An Agent-Based Modeling Analysis

The COVID-19 pandemic imposes new challenges on the capability of governments in intervening with the information dissemination and reducing the risk of infection outbreak. To reveal the complexity behind government intervention decision, we build a bi-layer network diffusion model for the information-disease dynamics that were intervened in and conduct a full space simulation to illustrate the trade-off faced by governments between information disclosing and blocking. The simulation results show that governments prioritize the accuracy of disclosed information over the disclosing speed when there is a high-level medical recognition of the virus and a high public health awareness, while, for the opposite situation, more strict information blocking is preferred. Furthermore, an unaccountable government tends to delay disclosing, a risk-averse government prefers a total blocking, and a low government credibility will discount the effect of information disclosing and aggravate the situation. These findings suggest that information intervention is indispensable for containing the outbreak of infectious disease, but its effectiveness depends on a complicated way on both external social/epidemic factors and the governments’internal preferences and governance capability, for which more thorough investigations are needed in the future.

ACE2 Protein-Protein Interaction Networks Reveal Potential Druggable Targets For SARS-CoV-2 (preprint)

Background: The novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has infected more than 130 million people, killed over 2.3 million so far. Currently, no effective drugs are available to treat this infectious disease, due to limited knowledge of the molecular mechanisms of SARS-CoV-2 infection. ACE2 (angiotensin I converting enzyme 2) has long been identified as the major receptor for coronavirus entry the host cells. Methods: In this study, we constructed the protein-protein interaction networks (PPIN) based on ACE2 and its interacting proteins, considering with the expression alternation and co-expression relationship. The potential drugs targeting the proteins in the PPIN were explored.Results: ACE2 and its interacting proteins AAMP and HRAS are obviously increased, and their PPIN show distinguishing expression patterns during the COVID-19 progression. At least six pathways are activated for the host cell in the response to the virus. Moreover, drug-target networks were built to provide important clues to block ACE2 and its interacting proteins. Except the reported four drugs for ACE2, its interacting protein CALM1 and HRAS are great potentially druggable. We also considered the path initiated from ACE2 to nucleus by cascades of interaction, especially for the transcription factors in the PPIN which are also druggable.Conclusion: In summary, this study provides new insight into the disruption of the biological response to virus mediated by ACE2, but also its cascade interacting proteins when considering of PPIN.