From cultural practices to risky behaviors to public sentiment: Modeling human behavior and disease transmission
Human behavior refers to the way humans act and interact with each other. It is moderated by factors like cultural values, individual attitudes, politics, religion, and genetic make-up. In this seminar, I will present three different epidemic models that include human behavior from Ebola to Methicillin Resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), and COVID-19. One of these behaviors is influenced by cultural practices, another by risky behaviors, and the third is moderated by public sentiment. I will show how we accounted for these behaviors from simply using a parameter to using approaches from social sciences to using Twitter data to quantify functional forms for public sentiment. I will close by exploring the role of these behaviors on disease propagation.