2021/01/19 by Irena Papst, Papst, Irena, Kevin O’Keeffe +3 · 1 citation
Mathematics · Medicine · #COVID-19 epidemiological studies #Dynamical Systems (math.DS) #FOS: Biological sciences #FOS: Mathematics #Influenza Virus Research Studies #Mathematical and Theoretical Epidemiology and Ecology Models #Populations and Evolution (q-bio.PE)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2101.07926
openalex publication_date 2021/01/19 · openalex created_date 2022/07/25 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Seasonal influenza presents an ongoing challenge to public health. The rapid\nevolution of the flu virus necessitates annual vaccination campaigns, but the\ndecision to get vaccinated or not in a given year is largely voluntary, at\nleast in the United States, and many people decide against it. In early\nattempts to model these yearly flu vaccine decisions, it was often assumed that\nindividuals behave rationally, and do so with perfect information --\nassumptions that allowed the techniques of classical economics and game theory\nto be applied. However, the usual assumptions are contradicted by the emerging\nempirical evidence about human decision-making behavior in this context. We\ndevelop a simple model of coupled disease spread and vaccination dynamics that\ninstead incorporates experimental observations from social psychology to model\nannual vaccine decision-making more realistically. We investigate\npopulation-level effects of these new decision-making assumptions, with the\ngoal of understanding whether the population can self-organize into a state of\nherd immunity, and if so, under what conditions. Our model agrees with\nestablished results while also revealing more subtle population-level behavior,\nincluding biennial oscillations about the herd immunity threshold.\n