In modern society, the spread of information through major mass media is one of, if not the most prevalent forms of communication of public issues and agenda. When these matters have the potential to drastically impact the population, particularly the populations’ health and safety, the ability to effectively and accurate spread awareness and information about these affairs is critical.
This project aims to assess the impact that media coverage has on the behaviour the population, which in term allows an understanding of the impact that the media has on the spread of infectious diseases. It ultimately concludes that, through complex mathematical modelling , the media coverage plays a crucial role in not only mitigating the peak in waves of infections, but in further significantly decrease the limiting value of the infections. Through the use of analytical and numerical methods, specifically the utilisation the coding software MATLAB, in-depth analyses of multiple mathematical models detailing the incidence of infectious diseases are presented.
The composition of this report is as follows. In chapter 2, an extensive review into previous research methods is performed, finding gaps in the body of literature that precedes this work. This ultimately provides the basis for this work, exhibiting the rich juxtaposition of three mathematical models which highlighting the true impact media coverage has on the behaviour of disease. Chapter 3 details the formation and analysis of the first mathematical model; the SIR (susceptible, infective, recovered) model. Numerical simulations are performed here, acting as the ‘base’ for the contrast of the succeeding models. In chapter 4, the SIR model is extended, including a hospitalised category, forming the SIHR model. In this chapter, further analysis of the disease incidence is performed through numerical simulations, which show the impact of including the hospitalised category. Chapter 5 extends the SIHR model by incorporating the impact of media coverage into the model, contrasting the preceding chapter, highlight the influence of the media. This contrast, as mentioned above, differentiates this project from others, by emphasising the differences in the behaviour of the solutions for each epidemic model. Finally, a conclusion is reached in chapter 6 and chapter 7 features an appendix of Figures used in the project. Ultimately, this paper uses basic models without media coverage to ‘build up’ to a model that does use media coverage to highlight the impact of media coverage.