Integrating psychosocial variables and societal diversity in epidemic models for predicting COVID-19 transmission dynamics
Bibliographic record
Abstract
During the current COVID-19 pandemic, governments must make decisions based on a variety of information including estimations of infection spread, health care capacity, economic and psychosocial considerations. The disparate validity of current short-term forecasts of these factors is a major challenge to governments. By causally linking an established epidemiological spread model with dynamically evolving psychosocial variables, using Bayesian inference we estimate the strength and direction of these interactions for German and Danish data of disease spread, human mobility, and psychosocial factors based on the serial cross-sectional COVID-19 Snapshot Monitoring (COSMO; N = 16,981). We demonstrate that the strength of cumulative influence of psychosocial variables on infection rates is of a similar magnitude as the influence of physical distancing. We further show that the efficacy of political interventions to contain the disease strongly depends on societal diversity, in particular group-specific sensitivity to affective risk perception. As a consequence, the model may assist in quantifying the effect and timing of interventions, forecasting future scenarios, and differentiating the impact on diverse groups as a function of their societal organization. Importantly, the careful handling of societal factors, including support to the more vulnerable groups, adds another direct instrument to the battery of political interventions fighting epidemic spread.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.008 | 0.019 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".