LitCovid-sentences  

PMC:7795931 / 23733-37525 JSONTXT 3 Projects

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Id Subject Object Predicate Lexical cue
T155 0-2 Sentence denotes 3.
T156 3-25 Sentence denotes Results and Discussion
T157 27-31 Sentence denotes 3.1.
T158 32-50 Sentence denotes Modeling Framework
T159 51-155 Sentence denotes Our model consists of two main systems: information dissemination system and behavioral response system.
T160 156-297 Sentence denotes In the information dissemination system, each individual sends (receives) information to (from) its neighbors through an information network.
T161 298-589 Sentence denotes Given that information will always be rapidly, extensively [22], and spontaneously [19] misrepresented during transmission, and that most people do not send more accurate information than they receive [17,18], we assume information gets distorted and misrepresented during each transmission.
T162 590-702 Sentence denotes In the behavioral response system, each individual makes a move according to its information (with probability).
T163 703-957 Sentence denotes Once informed about the epidemic, some people behave rationally such as practicing social distancing, while others behave irrationally such as flocking to churches [53], to supermarkets [54], and taking radical actions like repeated hospital visits [55].
T164 958-1034 Sentence denotes The information dissemination system affects the behavioral response system.
T165 1035-1165 Sentence denotes The government might intervene in the information dissemination to reduce infections by either disclosing or blocking information.
T166 1166-1319 Sentence denotes For information disclosing, the government discloses information to all individuals to make them behave rationally (or at least not behave irrationally).
T167 1320-1471 Sentence denotes Obviously, the more accurate the information is and the earlier it is disclosed, the public can be better guided which lowers the final infection rate.
T168 1472-1603 Sentence denotes However, it takes time for government to censor and screen information before disclosing, which brings an accuracy-speed trade-off.
T169 1604-1943 Sentence denotes We use a disclosing threshold to measure the government’s preference on speed or accuracy; a higher threshold indicates a higher preference on accuracy: a threshold “1” means the government would not disclose any information unless it is completely accurate; while “0” indicates an immediate disclosure without any censoring and screening.
T170 1944-2052 Sentence denotes For information blocking, the government blocks less-accurate information transmissions between individuals.
T171 2053-2145 Sentence denotes Obviously, a stringent blocking leads to a transmission of information with higher accuracy.
T172 2146-2308 Sentence denotes However, blocking will slow down the overall information dissemination in the network, and then slow down the government’s censoring and screening of information.
T173 2309-2368 Sentence denotes Thus, there is a trade-off between disclosing and blocking.
T174 2369-2624 Sentence denotes We use a blocking threshold to measure the blocking stringency, the government would block any transmission of any under-threshold information: a threshold “0” means no blocking at all; while “1” means that government blocks all information transmissions.
T175 2625-2682 Sentence denotes We analyze both of the optimal thresholds for government.
T176 2683-2761 Sentence denotes More details on the settings of our model can be found in the Methods section.
T177 2762-2844 Sentence denotes In reality, the government has a great influence on the information dissemination.
T178 2845-3100 Sentence denotes Thus, in our model, we assume that the government node is the most critical one and the government-disclosed information highly outweighs individuals’ information (except for the further discussion of a government with low credibility in a later section).
T179 3102-3106 Sentence denotes 3.2.
T180 3107-3153 Sentence denotes Intervention Dilemma in Disclosing Information
T181 3154-3273 Sentence denotes In this part, we will discuss the speed-accuracy trade-off results and analyze the mechanism in information disclosing.
T182 3274-3753 Sentence denotes First, Figure 3 summarizes the results of the simulations with 44 different external constraints, and we find that there is seldom a single dominant disclosing threshold (the government’s preference on speed or accuracy), i.e., seeking either speed or accuracy alone will not result in the lowest infection rate, and the optimal strategy (corresponding to the lowest infection rate at the end of the last period) is somewhere in between, which implies a speed-accuracy trade-off.
T183 3754-3917 Sentence denotes Specifically, the optimal disclosing threshold lies between both ends in about 84.09% of the cases, and their distributions vary in different external constraints.
T184 3918-4591 Sentence denotes Figure 3a,b show that (1) if the initial information is 1 or 0.8 and the individual threshold is in [0,0.7], the optimal disclosing threshold has a 91.75% probability of being in the middle, and mostly (66.89%) falls within [0.6,0.8]; (2) if the initial information is 0.6 and the individual threshold is in [0,0.5], the government has a 93.00% probability of dealing with a trade-off (Figure 3c), and the optimal disclosing threshold mostly (77.78%) falls in [0.4,0.6]; (3) if the initial information is 0.4, the optimal disclosing threshold will almost certainly be greater than 0.4 (99.98%), but the distribution is too scattered to give a specific interval (Figure 3d).
T185 4592-4671 Sentence denotes The mode of optimal disclosing threshold is 0.8 but only with 20.30% frequency.
T186 4672-5123 Sentence denotes In addition, we can see that, if the virus is medically well-known (ξ≥0.8) and public health awareness is low (XI≥0.7), the government shall prioritize accuracy over speed; if the virus is medically medium-known (ξ=0.6) and public awareness is high (XI≤0.5), the government shall balance speed and accuracy, which almost equally signifies; and if the virus in medically less-known (ξ=0.4), the government shall probably prioritize accuracy over speed.
T187 5124-5213 Sentence denotes Second, we will dissect the underlying logic and mechanism of the government’s trade-off.
T188 5214-5399 Sentence denotes We take one of the curves in Figure 3a that is denoted by ξ=1 and XI=0.5, as an example, to find the relationship between disclosing the threshold infection rate, then we have Figure 4.
T189 5400-6118 Sentence denotes In all 550 (11×50) experiments, the disclosing threshold for the lowest final infection rate usually lies between 0.7 and 0.9, and the final infection rate first falls then rises as the disclosing threshold increases, with the inflection point being at 0.8 (Figure 4a); the amount of final information per capita and the duration of government intervention both increase monotonically with the disclosing threshold (Figure 4b,e); the number of people infected after government intervention, the number of people infected by a panic after government intervention and the number of uninfected people remaining at the time of government intervention all negatively correlate with the disclosing threshold (Figure 4c,d,f).
T190 6119-6371 Sentence denotes One of the fundamental reasons for the government to balance speed and accuracy is the precipitous fall in the marginal contribution of accuracy as the disclosing threshold exceeds a certain “point”, while speed hardly affects the final infection rate.
T191 6372-6451 Sentence denotes The following is a detailed analysis on the effects of both accuracy and speed.
T192 6452-6749 Sentence denotes With respect to accuracy, the effect comes from two perspectives: (1) accurate information lowers the infection from panic in a healthy panic-prone population (Figure 4d); (2) accurate information changes the behavior routine in the panic-prone population, which reduces the spread of the disease.
T193 6750-7005 Sentence denotes Both (1) and (2) are in play until the disclosing threshold exceeds 0.5 (XI in our example); after that, there is no longer a panic-prone group, neither is infection from panic, which explains the precipitous fall in the marginal contribution of accuracy.
T194 7006-7269 Sentence denotes When it comes to speed, the effect comes from two perspectives as well: (1) the time the government spends on censoring and screening information, which we call a lag; (2) the number of remaining uninfected people at the time of government disclosing information.
T195 7270-7430 Sentence denotes The more accurate information the government seeks, the longer the lag (Figure 4e) and the fewer uninfected people remain at the time of disclosing (Figure 4f).
T196 7431-7583 Sentence denotes Notice that both have roughly the same slope with respect to disclosing threshold, which explains a roughly constant marginal cost of pursuing accuracy.
T197 7584-8118 Sentence denotes The combination of constant marginal costs and abrupt fall in marginal benefits leads to an inflection point in disclosing threshold, which explains the heterogeneity in the distribution of optimal disclosing threshold: as disclosing threshold exceeds individual threshold, a sudden fall of benefits occurs, which theoretically makes the optimal disclosing threshold slightly greater than the individual threshold, which explains what we discussed above that the intervals in which the optimal disclosing threshold mostly lays differ.
T198 8119-8423 Sentence denotes In most cases, the government’s premature disclosing of inaccurate information will contaminate the overall network, while obsession with accuracy may have the government miss the disclosure window before too many people are infected, which is intolerable to government who requires a low infection rate.
T199 8424-8451 Sentence denotes Thus, there is a trade-off.
T200 8453-8457 Sentence denotes 3.3.
T201 8458-8502 Sentence denotes Intervention Dilemma in Blocking Information
T202 8503-8685 Sentence denotes We assume the government will block any transmission of under-the-blocking-threshold (XB) information between individuals; thus, XB=0 denotes the special case in previous discussion.
T203 8686-8723 Sentence denotes Other settings are the same as above.
T204 8724-8812 Sentence denotes In this part, we will discuss the optimal blocking strategies and analyze the mechanism.
T205 8813-8891 Sentence denotes As shown in Figure 5, the optimal blocking threshold varies from case to case.
T206 8892-9228 Sentence denotes Overall, a small blocking threshold ([0.1,0.3]) is necessarily (100%) not optimal; a strict blocking threshold (XB≥0.8) is usually (50.41%) optimal, experimental data show a value between 45% and 55% in most external conditions; but 0 is the optimal threshold still in 20.25% of cases, and usually (89.80%) occurs when ξ≥0.8 and XI≤0.7.
T207 9229-9313 Sentence denotes When the initial information is low (ξ≤0.6), not blocking is seldom (0.83%) optimal.
T208 9314-9363 Sentence denotes We have our key findings from the above analysis.
T209 9364-9614 Sentence denotes First, minor blocking is not an option for government because it is dominated by stricter blocking in a deteriorated or being deteriorated information environment and undermines the efficiency of information dissemination in a benevolent environment.
T210 9615-9888 Sentence denotes Second, in the age of the Internet, information is extremely interconnected and low-quality information is more easily disseminated, thus stricter information blocking might be an option worth considering in the early stages of an outbreak of an unknown infectious disease.
T211 9889-10183 Sentence denotes Finally, if the virus is well-known at the medical level, plus the public has a certain level of health awareness, free spread of information might improve the situation; while, otherwise, as in the case of COVID-19, governments should intervene in the spread of information in social networks.
T212 10184-10322 Sentence denotes From the simulation results, we can see that, in most cases, the optimal strategy will be either highly stringent blocking or free spread.
T213 10323-10482 Sentence denotes Blocking low-quality information not only increases the overall information of the whole population, but causes side effects under certain external conditions.
T214 10483-10543 Sentence denotes Thus, not blocking can be an optimal strategy in some cases.
T215 10544-10632 Sentence denotes In this section, we provide an in-depth analysis of the data and a mechanistic analysis.
T216 10633-10892 Sentence denotes Figure 5b reveals in general the optimal blocking threshold negatively correlates with initial information: as initial information drops from 1 to 0.4, the probability of optimal blocking threshold taking 0 will be 52.07%, 27.27%, 1.65%, and 0%, respectively.
T217 10893-10992 Sentence denotes Figure 5c shows a positive correlation between optimal blocking threshold and individual threshold.
T218 10993-11176 Sentence denotes Governments block information mainly by suppressing less-accurate information, but which, once implemented, will slow down the overall information dissemination in the network anyway.
T219 11177-11282 Sentence denotes Therefore, blocking can neither be too stringent nor too liberal, an optimal one usually lies in between.
T220 11283-11383 Sentence denotes However, mild blocking is necessarily not optimal as it fails to purify the information environment.
T221 11384-11540 Sentence denotes Furthermore, when the virus is well-known (ξ=1), especially when public health awareness is high (XI≤0.3), not blocking dominates most of the time (69.70%).
T222 11541-11752 Sentence denotes While stringent blocking (XB≥0.8) is necessarily not (0%) an optimal strategy because higher-quality information, which helps to slow the spread of the disease with high public health awareness, is also blocked.
T223 11753-11943 Sentence denotes Thus, when both the initial information and the level of public health awareness are at a high level, not blocking is optimal; otherwise, information that would not cause panic might do now.
T224 11944-12087 Sentence denotes In addition, when medical awareness of the virus declines, so does the proportion of valuable information, which necessitates blocking as well.
T225 12089-12093 Sentence denotes 3.4.
T226 12094-12147 Sentence denotes Optimal Intervention under Different Government Types
T227 12148-12280 Sentence denotes In previous sections, our study was based on the neutral government assumption that governments only seek the lowest infection rate.
T228 12281-12438 Sentence denotes However, in reality, a government is not a personalized organization pursuing social optimum because it is often checked by various inside and outside nodes.
T229 12439-12502 Sentence denotes In addition, government credibility makes a difference as well.
T230 12503-12614 Sentence denotes In this section, we will discuss the optimal strategy for non-neutral governments and low-credible governments.
T231 12615-12814 Sentence denotes An unaccountable government that evades responsibilities would only care for lower new infections after intervention rather than global infections, which digresses from the objective described above.
T232 12815-12940 Sentence denotes As shown in Figure 6a, the later the government discloses information, the less that will be newly infected after disclosure.
T233 12941-13137 Sentence denotes There are two underlying reasons: (1) late disclosed information will indeed be more accurate, which reduces the infection rate; and (2) there are less uninfected people at the time of disclosing.
T234 13138-13235 Sentence denotes Therefore, a blame-evading government would delay the disclosing to avoid being held accountable.
T235 13236-13437 Sentence denotes A conservative government that prefers the least error-prone strategy (minimizing maximum loss) rather than the optimal one (the loss minimization strategy) would block all the information (Figure 6b).
T236 13438-13677 Sentence denotes Since the optimal strategy would not be accessed until all external conditions are fully judged and scrutinized, which is not feasible for COVID-19, complete blocking would be optimal for such a government to avoid the worst case scenario.
T237 13678-13792 Sentence denotes Our experiment of 484 different scenarios manifests a complete blocking will never lead to the highest infections.