The Impact of Competitive Opinion on Epidemic Spreading and Its Applications

The community's opinion on epidemics has played an important role in government departments controlling the spread of infectious diseases. However, one of the most effective ways to analyze and understand the impact of community opinions on epidemics is to establish an effective mathematical model. In this paper, we propose a nonlinear discrete-time dynamics model to investigate the impact of the competitive opinion on the epidemic spreading. For the social network with cooperative and competitive interactions, sufficient conditions guaranteeing the stability of healthy equilibrium and unhealthy equilibrium are obtained in terms of the opinion based reproduction number. By introducing the stubborn community, it is revealed that the disappearance or coexistence of the epidemic depends on the initial level of the community infection. Based on the real data from a survey conducted on a sample of U.S. residents, we employ the proposed nonlinear epidemic-opinion model to explore the impacts of the non-pharmaceutical interventions on COVID-19 in human contact network, region traveling network and Chicago transportation network, respectively. It is further validated that the non-pharmacological interventions have a significant positive impact on reducing infection.