Md. Mijanur Rahman, PhD student – University of British Columbia, Okanagan

Supervisor – Rebecca Tyson, Co-supervisor – Eric Foxall

Project Description: It is well-known that human behaviour affects disease transmission, and so disease models have included this influence by subdividing the population into groups that engage in different levels of prophylaxis. The behaviour, however, is generally seen as a response to outside forces such as government-mandated shutdowns. Behavioural changes, however, also occur spontaneously, as individuals respond to the information in their environment. In this project, Mijanur is studying a mathematical model in which human behaviour changes spontaneously, with a bias toward prophylaxis when disease prevalence is high. By parameterizing the model using COVID-19 data from the BC Southern Interior and the Yukon, Mijanur is studying the effect of spontaneous changes in behaviour on the evolution of the epidemic, and the different ways in which opinion dynamics operated in the two regions. Since opinion dynamics data is scarce, Mijanur is doing the data fitting using a novel statistical technique in which differential equations are used to provide the underlying fitting framework. This work is being done in collaboration with the BCCDC and Yukon Department of Health and Social Services.