The effect of behavior of wearing masks on epidemic dynamics
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ORIGINAL PAPER
The effect of behavior of wearing masks on epidemic dynamics Weiqiang Li · Jin Zhou · Jun-an Lu
Received: 24 April 2020 / Accepted: 10 June 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract Recently, COVID-19 has attracted a lot of attention of researchers from different fields. Wearing masks is a frequently adopted precautionary measure. In this paper, we investigate the effect of behavior of wearing masks on epidemic dynamics in the context of COVID-19. At each time, every susceptible individual chooses whether to wear a mask or not in the next time step, which depends on an evaluation of the potential costs and perceived risk of infection. When the cost of infection is high, the majority of the population choose to wear masks, where global awareness plays a significant role. However, if the mask source is limited, global awareness may give rise to a negative result. In this case, more mask source should be allocated to the individuals with high risk of infection. Keywords Epidemic dynamics · Behavior of wearing masks · Global awareness 1 Introduction In recent months, the term COVID-19 has been known worldwide. COVID-19 was first reported in Wuhan, China in November 2019 and then spread rapidly to other district of China by means of Spring Festival W. Li · J. Zhou (B) · J. Lu School of Mathematics and Statistics, Wuhan University, Wuhan 430072, China J. Zhou e-mail: [email protected]
travel rush. Globalization further facilitates the transmission of the virus to the world. By 17 April 2020, the number of reported confirmed cases exceeded 2 million in 211 countries, territories or areas, and about 140,000 people died from the disease [1]. As a novel coronavirus, no drug and vaccine have been confirmed to be effective and applicable by clinical trials so far. To stop the spread of virus, governments and organizations have implemented and provided a series of policies and advice. For example, in order to cut off virus output, Wuhan city underwent a lockdown and travel restrictions [2]. For persons, the common advice includes staying home as much as possible, keeping social distancing and washing hands often [3– 5]. Compared with keeping social distancing, staying home and even quarantine strategy, wearing masks is a more frequently adopted precautionary measure and has less influence on a society. Moreover, different from the perfect protection measures such as vaccination [6,7], the masks can only reduce the risk of infection to some extent. In this paper, we investigate the effect of behavior of wearing masks on epidemic dynamics in the context of COVID-19. Inspired by game theory [8– 11], the decision of each individual about whether to wear a mask or not depends on an evaluation of his/her potential costs and perceived risk of infection. The perceived risk mainly relies on two kinds of sources: local infection information and global infection information [12–16]. Herein, in calculating the risk of infection, we
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call the situation of local information and global information being i
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