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How fear affects coronavirus spread – explains new study

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To better understand how pandemics might arise in several waves of infections, such as the ones we’re witnessing with COVID-19, a new mathematical model for predicting infectious disease pandemics adds fear—both of disease and of vaccines.

Researchers at NYU School of Global Public Health developed the “Triple Contagion” model of disease and fear, which was published in the Journal of The Royal Society Interface.

For centuries, human behaviors such as social distancing (which slows spread) and vaccine refusal (which speeds it up) have shaped pandemic dynamics. Traditional pandemic models, on the other hand, have largely overlooked human behaviour and the fears that motivate it.

“Emotions like fear can override rational behavior and prompt unconstructive behavioral change,” said Joshua Epstein, the study’s lead author and professor of epidemiology at NYU School of Global Public Health.

“Fear of a contagious disease can shift how susceptible individuals behave; they may take action to protect themselves, but abandon those actions prematurely as fear decays.”

For example, the fear of contracting a virus like SARS-CoV-2 can cause healthy people to isolate themselves at home or wear masks, preventing the virus from spreading.

However, because the spread of infection is reduced, people’s fear may fade, leading them to stop isolating or wearing masks too soon, when there are still many infected people around. This adds fuel to the embers in the form of vulnerable people, causing a new wave to erupt.

Epstein and his colleagues’ mathematical model accounts for behavioural factors such as the proportion of the population that fears the disease or vaccine, as well as how adverse events from vaccinations can induce fear, in addition to the rate of disease transmission, percentage of the population that is vaccinated, and rate of vaccination.

Furthermore, the model recognises that fear does not exist in a vacuum: it can spread throughout a population as a result of misinformation or alarming updates, or it can fade with time or reassuring news.

“Neuroscience suggests that fear itself can be contagious, but fear also tends to fade or decay. In our model, people may overcome their fears of disease and vaccineeither over time, when disease prevalence drops, or from interactions with others who recovered from COVID or got the vaccine and had minimal side effects,” said Epstein.

The model shows how the two fears evolve and interact to shape social distancing behaviour, vaccine uptake, and relaxation of these behaviours. These dynamics, in turn, can amplify or suppress disease transmission, influencing behaviour and resulting in disease resurgence and multiple waves.

“Our ‘Triple Contagion’ model draws on the neuroscience of fear learning, extinction, and transmission to reveal new mechanisms for multiple pandemic waves of the sort we see in the current SARS-CoV-2 pandemic and novel ways to think about mitigating its spread,” said Erez Hatna, one of the coauthors of the study and clinical associate professor of epidemiology at NYU School of Global Public Health.

Image Credit: Getty

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