Do "soft" interventions matter more than vaccination? Rabies as an example.

Interventions such as vaccinations, treatment et cetera are usually the gold standard of disease control, as measured by reducing the reproduction number below unity. However, in practice, few diseases are reduced below this eradication threshold and instead persist despite active intervention campaigns. We propose an epidemic model of rabies with a saturated incidence rate that represents "soft" interventions such as public-awareness campaigns, animal curfews, fences etc. We prove local and global stability results based on the reproduction number. However, numerical simulations suggest that eradication is unlikely to occur using current practices. We thus investigate the effect of altering the saturated incidence term using "soft" interventions and show that near-eradication can be achieved even when the reproduction number exceeds unity. Soft interventions such as public-awareness campaigns, reducing contacts, animal curfews and fences can have a greater effect on eradicating rabies than current vaccination programs.