  In this work, the aim is to study the spread of a contagious disease and
information on a multilayer social system. The main idea is to find a criterion
under which the adoption of the spreading information blocks or suppresses the
epidemic spread. A two-layer network is the base of the model. The first layer
describes the direct contact interactions, while the second layer is the
information propagation layer. Both layers consist of the same nodes. The
society consists of five different categories of individuals: susceptibles,
infective, recovered, vaccinated and precautioned. Initially, only one infected
individual starts transmitting the infection. Direct contact interactions
spread the infection to the susceptibles. The information spreads through the
second layer. The SIR model is employed for the infection spread, while the
Bass equation models the adoption of information. The control parameters of the
competition between the spread of information and spread of disease are the
topology and the density of connectivity. The topology of the information layer
is a scale-free network with increasing density of edges. In the contact layer,
regular and scale-free networks with the same average degree per node are used
interchangeably. The observation is that increasing complexity of the contact
network reduces the role of individual awareness. If the contact layer consists
of networks with limited range connections, or the edges sparser than the
information network, spread of information plays a significant role in
controlling the epidemics.
