Assessing the spatial variability of raising public risk awareness for the intervention performance of COVID-19 voluntary screening: A spatial simulation approach

The rapid spread of a (re)emerging pandemic (e.g., COVID-19) is usually attributed to the invisible transmission caused by asymptomatic cases. Health authorities rely on large-scale voluntary screening to identify and isolate invisible spreaders as well as symptomatic people as early as possible to control disease spread. Raising public awareness is beneficial for improving the effectiveness of epidemic prevention because it could increase the usage and demand for testing kits. However, the effectiveness of testing could be influenced by the spatial demand for medical resources in different periods. Spatial demand could also be triggered by public awareness in areas with two geographical factors, including spatial proximity to resources and attractiveness of human mobility. Therefore, it is necessary to explore the spatial variations in raising public awareness on the effectiveness of COVID-19 screening. We implemented spatial simulation models to integrate various levels of public awareness and pandemic dynamics in time and space. Moreover, we also assessed the effects of the spatial proximity of testing kits and the ease of human mobility on COVID-19 testing at various levels of public awareness. Our results indicated that high public awareness promotes high willingness to be tested. This causes the demand to not be fully satisfied at the peak times during a pandemic, yet the shortage of tests does not significantly increase pandemic severity. We also found that when public awareness is low, concentrating on unattractive areas (such as residential or urban fringe areas) could promote a higher benefit of testing. On the other hand, when awareness is high, the factor of distances to testing stations is more important for promoting the benefit of testing; allocating additional testing resources in areas distant from stations could have a higher benefit of testing. This study aims to provide insights for health authorities into the allocation of testing resources against disease outbreaks with respect to various levels of public awareness.