Impact of time-dependent infection rate and self-isolation awareness on networked epidemic propagation

In the past decades, numerous models have been proposed in epidemic modeling. However, few of them describe the dynamic variation process of the infection rates, and the impact of infected individuals’ safety awareness on epidemic spreading has also been rarely studied. We propose a novel epidemic spreading model with time-dependent infection rates (TDIR) and self-isolation awareness (SIA). The TDIR describes the variation in infection rates over time, and the SIA denotes the infected individuals’ safety awareness. The results show that both TDIR and SIA can suppress the spread of the epidemic, and SIA has a greater impact on the peak infection and the time to peak infection compared with TDIR, while TDIR plays a critical role in eradicating the epidemic. Additionally, a higher intensity of SIA causes a lower peak distribution and stationary infection density. As the intensity of SIA increases, its inhibitory effect on the peak infection exhibits a marginal effect. Furthermore, when considering different epidemic models with TDIR and SIA, simulation results indicate that the infection density distribution is similar, but the corresponding infection density values vary significantly.