Dong Fureng Economic and Social Development School, Wuhan University, Beijing 100010, China.
National School of Development, Southeast University, Nanjing 210000, China.
Int J Environ Res Public Health. 2020 Dec 28;18(1):147. doi: 10.3390/ijerph18010147.
The COVID-19 pandemic imposes new challenges on the capability of governments in intervening with the information dissemination and reducing the risk of infection outbreak. To reveal the complexity behind government intervention decision, we build a bi-layer network diffusion model for the information-disease dynamics that were intervened in and conduct a full space simulation to illustrate the trade-off faced by governments between information disclosing and blocking. The simulation results show that governments prioritize the accuracy of disclosed information over the disclosing speed when there is a high-level medical recognition of the virus and a high public health awareness, while, for the opposite situation, more strict information blocking is preferred. Furthermore, an unaccountable government tends to delay disclosing, a risk-averse government prefers a total blocking, and a low government credibility will discount the effect of information disclosing and aggravate the situation. These findings suggest that information intervention is indispensable for containing the outbreak of infectious disease, but its effectiveness depends on a complicated way on both external social/epidemic factors and the governments' internal preferences and governance capability, for which more thorough investigations are needed in the future.
新冠疫情对政府干预信息传播和降低感染爆发风险的能力提出了新的挑战。为了揭示政府干预决策背后的复杂性，我们构建了一个双层网络扩散模型，用于研究被干预的信息-疾病动态，并进行全空间模拟，以说明政府在信息披露和封锁之间面临的权衡。模拟结果表明，当病毒的医学认知水平较高且公众健康意识较高时，政府会优先考虑披露信息的准确性而非速度；而在相反的情况下，则更倾向于严格封锁信息。此外，不负责任的政府往往会延迟披露信息，风险规避型政府则更倾向于全面封锁，而低政府信誉则会降低信息披露的效果，加剧局势恶化。这些发现表明，信息干预对于控制传染病的爆发是必不可少的，但它的有效性取决于外部社会/疫情因素以及政府内部偏好和治理能力的复杂方式，未来还需要更深入的研究。
