Social Dilemma of Non-Pharmaceutical Interventions

TL;DR

This paper explores how individual compliance with non-pharmaceutical interventions during epidemics varies dynamically over time, influenced by perceived costs and effectiveness, affecting overall epidemic control.

Contribution

It introduces a model capturing the dynamic, context-dependent compliance behavior with NPIs, providing new insights into improving adherence during epidemics.

Findings

Compliance with NPIs is highly dynamic and context-dependent.

Perceived costs and effectiveness influence NPI adoption behavior.

Understanding these dynamics can improve epidemic mitigation strategies.

Abstract

In fighting infectious diseases posing a global health threat, ranging from influenza to Zika, non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPI), such as social distancing and face covering, remain mitigation measures public health can resort to. However, the success of NPI lies in sufficiently high levels of collective compliance, otherwise giving rise to waves of infection incidences that are not only driven by pathogen evolution but also changing vigilance in the population. Here we show that compliance with each NPI measure can be highly dynamic and context-dependent during an ongoing epidemic, where individuals may prefer one to another or even do nothing, leading to intricate temporal switching behavior of NPI adoptions. By characterizing dynamic regimes through the perceived costs of NPI measures and their effectiveness in particular regarding face covering and social distancing, our work offers new insights into overcoming barriers in NPI adoptions.