Epidemic spreading with information-driven vaccination

Epidemic spreading has been well studied in the past decade, where the main concentration is focused on the influence of network topology but little attention is paid to the individual's crisis awareness. We here study how the crisis awareness, i.e., personal self-protection, influences the epidemic spreading by presenting a susceptible-infected-recovered model with information-driven vaccination. We introduce two parameters to quantitatively characterize the crisis awareness. One is the information creation rate λ and the other is the information sensitivity η. We find that the epidemic spreading can be significantly suppressed in both the homogeneous and heterogeneous networks when both λ and η are relatively large. More interesting is that the needed vaccine will be significantly reduced when the information is well spread, which is a good news for the poor countries and regions with limited resources.