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Awareness-driven behavior changes can shift the shape of epidemics away from peaks and toward plateaus, shoulders, and oscillations
Significance In contrast to predictions of conventional epidemic models, COVID-19 outbreak time series have highly asymmetric shapes, with cases and fatalities declining much more slowly than they rose. Here, we investigate how awareness-driven behavior modulates epidemic shape. We find that short-term awareness of fatalities leads to emergent plateaus, persistent shoulder-like …