Modelling the Impact of Media-Induced Social Distancing on the Containment of COVID-19 in Beijing

ABSTRACT

With the multiple waves of COVID-19 in China and other countries, there is an urgent need to design effective containment, especially nonpharmaceutical interventions, to combat the transmission. Media reports on COVID-19—which can induce precautionary behaviour such as social distancing, by providing disease-related information to the public—are thought to be effective in containing the spread. We include the media-reporting data collected from authoritative and popular websites, along with the corresponding IP-visiting data, to study the effects of media reports in curbing the outbreak of COVID-19 in Beijing. To quantify how social distancing affects the spread of COVID-19, we differentiate the fully susceptible from those susceptibles who are media aware and practice social distancing or are quarantined. We propose a discrete compartment model with the fully susceptible, the media-aware susceptible, and the quarantined susceptible as three separate classes. We adopt functions dependent on the media reports and the contacts of media-aware susceptibles to describe the progression rate of susceptibles to media-aware susceptibles. By fitting the targeted model to data on the two Beijing outbreaks, we estimated the reproduction numbers for the two outbreaks as R 0 = 1.6818 and R 0 = 1.3251 , respectively. Cross-correlation analysis on our collected data suggests a strong correlation between the media reporting and epidemic case data. Sensitivity and uncertainty analysis show that even with the intensified interventions in force, reducing either the social distancing uptake rate or the average duration of social distancing for media-aware susceptibles could aggravate the severity of the two outbreaks in Beijing by magnifying the final confirmed cases and lengthening the end time of the pandemic. Our findings demonstrate that enhancing social distancing and media reporting alone, if done in sufficient measures, are enough to alleviate the COVID-19 epidemic. [ FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of Discrete Dynamics in Nature & Society is the property of Hindawi Limited and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full . (Copyright applies to all s.)