A behaviour and disease transmission model: incorporating the Health Belief Model for human behaviour into a simple transmission model.
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Date
2024-06-05
Open Access Location
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
The Royal Society
Rights
(c) 2024 The Author/s
CC BY 4.0
CC BY 4.0
Abstract
The health and economic impacts of infectious diseases such as COVID-19 affect all levels of a community from the individual to the governing bodies. However, the spread of an infectious disease is intricately linked to the behaviour of the people within a community since crowd behaviour affects individual human behaviour, while human behaviour affects infection spread, and infection spread affects human behaviour. Capturing these feedback loops of behaviour and infection is a well-known challenge in infectious disease modelling. Here, we investigate the interface of behavioural science theory and infectious disease modelling to explore behaviour and disease (BaD) transmission models. Specifically, we incorporate a visible protective behaviour into the susceptible-infectious-recovered-susceptible (SIRS) transmission model using the socio-psychological Health Belief Model to motivate behavioural uptake and abandonment. We characterize the mathematical thresholds for BaD emergence in the BaD SIRS model and the feasible steady states. We also explore, under different infectious disease scenarios, the effects of a fully protective behaviour on long-term disease prevalence in a community, and describe how BaD modelling can investigate non-pharmaceutical interventions that target-specific components of the Health Belief Model. This transdisciplinary BaD modelling approach may reduce the health and economic impacts of future epidemics.
Description
Keywords
Health Belief Model, behaviour modelling, epidemiology, transmission modelling, Humans, COVID-19, SARS-CoV-2, Health Belief Model, Health Behavior
Citation
Ryan M, Brindal E, Roberts M, Hickson RI. (2024). A behaviour and disease transmission model: incorporating the Health Belief Model for human behaviour into a simple transmission model.. J R Soc Interface. 21. 215. (pp. 20240038-).