  The impact that information diffusion has on epidemic spreading has recently
attracted much attention. As a disease begins to spread in the population,
information about the disease is transmitted to others, which in turn has an
effect on the spread of disease. In this paper, using empirical results of the
propagation of H7N9 and information about the disease, we clearly show that the
spreading dynamics of the two-types of processes influence each other. We build
a mathematical model in which both types of spreading dynamics are described
using the SIS process in order to illustrate the influence of information
diffusion on epidemic spreading. Both the simulation results and the pairwise
analysis reveal that information diffusion can increase the threshold of an
epidemic outbreak, decrease the final fraction of infected individuals and
significantly decrease the rate at which the epidemic propagates. Additionally,
we find that the multi-outbreak phenomena of epidemic spreading, along with the
impact of information diffusion, is consistent with the empirical results.
These findings highlight the requirement to maintain social awareness of
diseases even when the epidemics seem to be under control in order to prevent a
subsequent outbreak. These results may shed light on the in-depth understanding
of the interplay between the dynamics of epidemic spreading and information
diffusion.
