The Impacts of Anti-Protective Awareness and Protective Awareness Programs on COVID-19 Outbreaks

Media promotion is a double-edged sword. To investigate the dual effects of the media on the prevalence of COVID-19, a novel mathematical model which incorporates protective awareness programs and anti-protective awareness programs generated by the media as two separate dynamic variables is devised. The stability properties of equilibria and uniform persistence of the model are analyzed. Specifically, we calibrate the model to epidemic data from Canada and Japan by using the Markov Chain Monte Carlo algorithm so as to disentangle the outcomes of anti-protective awareness and protective awareness programs. Meanwhile, we explore different counterfactual scenarios in which the interaction rates between susceptible individuals and awareness programs are modified to assess the effects of awareness programs on the outbreak of COVID-19. It is found that when the number of infections or deaths increases, the number of anti-protective awareness programs decreases while the number of protective awareness programs increases, and vice versa. Reducing the interaction between aware susceptible individuals and anti-protective awareness programs (or improving the interaction between unaware susceptible individuals and protective awareness programs) has an inhibitory effect on the outbreak of COVID-19.