Changing readiness to mitigate SARS-CoV-2 steered long-term epidemic and social trajectories.

ABSTRACT: Societal responses crucially shape the course of a pandemic, but are difficult to predict. Mitigation measures such as social distancing are here assumed to minimize a utility function that consists of two conflicting sub-targets, the disease related mortality and the multifaceted consequences of mitigation. The relative weight of the two sub-targets defines the mitigation readiness H, which entails the political, social, and psychological aspects of decision making. The dynamics of social and behavioral mitigation thus follows an adaptive rule, which in turn is mediated by a non-adaptive dynamics of H. This framework for social dynamics is integrated into an epidemiological model and applied to the ongoing SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. Unperturbed simulations accurately reproduce diverse epidemic

SUBMITTER: Wirtz K 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8260599 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature