Media Coverage And Hospital Notifications: Correlation Analysis And Model Research

Mass media plays an important role in our daily life and especially can be used to inform the public and to tell us how to take prevention measures effectively dur-ing pandemics and epidemics. More specifically speaking, news reporting has the potential to strength a community's knowledge related to the emerging infectious diseases and thus affects peoples'attitudes and behavior. For example, people can quickly know the information such as hospital notifications, disease-induced mor-bidity and mortality, and then enforces control and prevention measures including wearing mask, hand washing, keeping social distance and so on. Therefore, a com-prehensive understanding of the effects of media during an epidemic or pandemic threat can aid in promoting public health communication strategies and disease mit-igation measures, which has direct or indirect effects on the magnitude of the peak, the peak time and the final size.Therefore, we developed a quantitative approach to evaluate the effects of media on such behavior, this method which would be contributed to people comprehensive understanding of the crucial effects of media. To begin with, in chapter 2, we obtained a statistically significant correlation between the number of daily news items and the number of new hospital notifications by Pearson correlation analysis and cross-correlation analysis. We further noted that different individuals may only focus on the news from the websites which they usually access to. Therefore, we averaged the number of daily news items for the above four websites and confirmed the correlation and interaction between the number of daily news items and the number of new hospital notifications.However, it is difficult to quantify how they affect each other dynamically. Thus, in order to address these, in chapter 3, we also proposed a novel model to examine the implication for transmission dynamics of these correlations. The model taken the media coverage as a variable and enhanced the traditional epidemic SEIR model with the addition of media dynamics. We used a nonlinear least squares estimation to identify the best-fit parameter values in the model from the observed data. In addition, a stochastic simulation was used to get the reasonable estimate of the mean basic reproduction number and its 95% confidence interval.Furthermore, in chapter 4, we carried out the uncertainty and sensitivity anal-yses to determine key parameters during early phase of the disease outbreak for the final outcome of the outbreak with media impact and remarked that the ef-fectiveness of the media reports was the greatest when the weight of media effects sensitive to the accumulated number of hospital notifications increased, the media spontaneous disappearance rate decreased, the individuals' behavior altered. When these happened, the contact transmission rate and the transition rate, which are responsible for the lowering accumulated number of hospital notifications, decrease. We also note that the larger the weight of new hospital notifications effects sensitive to the average number of daily news items is, the larger the effects of the disease on the media reports are. Also, the higher the recovered rate is, the smaller the accumulated number of hospital notifications are.In conclusion, this study presents a novel methodology through using cross-correlation analysis and taking the media coverage as a variable and the dynamics of the number of news reports into the classical SEIR model, which shows that combining statistical analysis with a mathematical model is beneficial for analyzing media impacts. It demonstrates that the media reports affect the accumulated num-ber of hospital notifications by reducing the transmission rate and the spontaneous disappearance rate of media reports, and increasing coverage duration of the media. All these results confirmed the importance of the responses of individuals to the media reports, with behavior changes being more important in emerging infectious disease control than the substantial media paying more attention to unexpected events and reports. Therefore, for relieving and mitigating emerging infectious dis-ease, the media publicity should be focused on how to guide people's behavioral changes, which are critical for the control of the disease.