Mining Online Social Media to Drive Psychologically Valid Agent Models of Regional Covid-19 Mask Wearing

Understanding how humans respond to an ongoing pandemic and interventions is crucial to monitoring and forecasting the dynamics of viral transmission. Heterogeneous response over time and geographical regions may depend on the individual beliefs and information consumption patterns of populations. To address the need for more precise and accurate epidemiological models we are researching Psychologically Valid Agent models of human responses to epidemic information and non-pharmaceutical interventions during the COVID-19 global pandemic with input drivers induced from sources including online media that provide indicators of pandemic awareness, beliefs, and attitudes.