Countering the potential re-emergence of a deadly infectious disease—Information warfare, identifying strategic threats, launching countermeasures

• Published in: PloS one 2021-08, Vol.16 (8), p.e0256014-e0256014
• Main Authors: Ali, Rex N, Rubin, Harvey, Sarkar, Saswati
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Biology and Life Sciences; Disease susceptibility; Disinformation; Evaluation; Health aspects; Influence; Information warfare; Medicine and Health Sciences; Social aspects; Social media; Vaccination
• ISSN: 1932-6203; 1932-6203
• DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0256014

Eradicated infectious diseases like smallpox can re-emerge through accident or the designs of bioterrorists, and cause heavy casualties. Presently, the populace is largely susceptible as only a small percentage is vaccinated, and their immunity is likely to have waned. And when the disease re-emerges, the susceptible individuals may be manipulated by disinformation on Social Media to refuse vaccines. Thus, a combination of countermeasures consisting of antiviral drugs and vaccines and a range of policies for their application need to be investigated. Opinions regarding whether to receive vaccines evolve over time through social exchanges via networks that overlap with but are not identical to the disease propagation networks. These couple the spread of the biological and information contagion and necessitate a joint investigation of the two. We develop a computationally tractable metapopulation epidemiological model that captures the joint spatio-temporal evolution of an infectious disease (e.g., smallpox, COVID-19) and opinion dynamics. Considering smallpox, the computations based on the model show that opinion dynamics have a substantial impact on the fatality count. Towards understanding how perpetrators are likely to seed the infection, we identify a) the initial distribution of infected individuals that maximize the overall fatality count; and b) which habitation structures are more vulnerable to outbreaks. We assess the relative efficacy of different countermeasures and conclude that a combination of vaccines and drugs minimize the fatalities, and by itself, drugs reduce fatalities more than the vaccine. Accordingly, we assess the impact of increase in the supply of drugs and identify the most effective among a collection of policies for administering of drugs for various parameter combinations. Many of the observed patterns are stable to variations of a diverse set of parameters. Our findings provide a quantitative foundation for various important elements of public health discourse that have largely been conducted qualitatively.