Networked SIS Epidemics with Awareness

We study an SIS epidemic process over a static contact network where the nodes have partial information about the epidemic state. They react by limiting their interactions with their neighbors when they believe the epidemic is currently prevalent. A node's awareness is weighted by the fraction of infected neighbors in their social network, and a global broadcast of the fraction of infected nodes in the entire network. The dynamics of the benchmark (no awareness) and awareness models are described by discrete-time Markov chains, from which mean-field approximations (MFA) are derived. The states of the MFA are interpreted as the nodes' probabilities of being infected. We show a sufficient condition for existence of a "metastable", or endemic, state of the awareness model coincides with that of the benchmark model. Furthermore, we use a coupling technique to give a full stochastic comparison analysis between the two chains, which serves as a probabilistic analogue to the MFA analysis. In particular, we show that adding awareness reduces the expectation of any epidemic metric on the space of sample paths, e.g. eradication time or total infections. We characterize the reduction in expectations in terms of the coupling distribution. In simulations, we evaluate the effect social distancing has on contact networks from different random graph families (geometric, Erdős-Renyi, and scale-free random networks).