Modeling the effects of psychological fear and media-induced awareness on the dynamics of infectious diseases (Q6139070)

The paper studies a deterministic susceptible-infected-recovered (SIR)-type model of infectious diseases epidemiology where the population size is allowed to grow (due to birth or immigration) as well as decay (e.g., due to natural death) dynamically taking into account individuals' behavioural changes in response to the media advertisements to grow awareness of disease prevalence and risk, and to increase participation in non-pharmaceutic interventions. The time evolution of the population counts and the amount of media advertisements is described by a system of ordinary differential equations (ODEs). Most of the parameter values are borrowed from the literature. One of their primary contributions is Theorem 3.1, which is about the stability analysis of the disease-free equilibrium and the endemic equilibrium, and essentially says the disease-free equilibrium is unstable if the reproduction number is strictly greater than 1, and stable if strictly less than one, whereas the endemic equilibrium exhibits a more nuanced stability behaviour. They also perform extensive numerical simulations, which are helpful to guide intuition and test ``what-if'' scenarios. Since the model is a simplistic abstraction of reality, and moreover, entirely deterministic, it is not clear if public health experts will find the results useful. However, from the perspective of applied mathematics, it is an interesting study.