Infusing Culture in Compartmental Epidemic Models

There has been a recent surge of interest in modeling and forecasting epidemic outbreaks. Human behavior plays a key role in disease transmission and prevention. In this paper, we propose a systematic approach to model the effects of changes in human behavior by infusing socio-cultural factors within compartmentalized epidemic models. In particular, we have identified risk perception beliefs as critical epidemic related socio-cultural factors. We evaluated our model using the 2009 H1N1 epidemic scenario in Mexico and a preliminary COVID-19 scenario in the US. Our results show that including cultural information from even a sparse, small subset of events provides a significant improvement in prediction accuracy and explanatory capabilities.