Leveraging Opinions and Vaccination to Eradicate Networked Epidemics

Abstract

We introduce a multi-layer networked compartmental $SIRS-V_o$ model that captures opinion dynamics, disease spread, risk perception, and self-interest vaccine-uptake behavior in an epidemic process. We characterize the target vaccination criterion of the proposed model and conditions that guarantee the criterion is obtainable by influencing opinions on disease prevalence. We leverage this result to design an eradication strategy that leverages opinions and vaccination. Through numerical simulations, we show that the proposed eradication strategy is able to stabilize the epidemic process around a healthy state equilibrium, and the outbreak rebounds after the control signal is relaxed.