Social Network-Based Epidemic Spread With Opinion-Dependent Vaccination

In this letter, an epidemic dynamical model driven by perceived disease severity opinion in societies is investigated along with its various dynamical characteristics. More specifically, the epidemic model namely Susceptible-Infected-Recovered-Vaccinated (SIRV) is considered over a transmission network, while the opinion reflecting the perceived disease risk evolves over a social network. In particular, the global and the local stability conditions of the disease-free equilibrium (DFE), i.e., there is no disease in the network, have been investigated, wherein the local stability is revealed to be linked with the basic reproduction rate and the transverse (non-zero) eigenvalues of the Jacobian evaluated at the DFE points. Moreover, the local stability analysis of the endemic equilibrium (EE), i.e., where disease persists in the network, has been investigated. The simulation results verify the theoretical methods.