The ‘Icarus effect’ of preventative health behaviors

Abstract

Ongoing efforts to combat the global pandemic of COVID-19 via public health policy have revealed the critical importance of understanding how individuals understand and react to infection risks. We here present a model to explore how both individual observation and social learning are likely to shape behavioral, and therefore epidemiological, dynamics over time. Efforts to delay and reduce infections can compromise their own success, especially in populations with age-structure in both disease risk and social learning - two critical features of the current COVID-19 crisis. Our results concur with anecdotal observations of age-based differences in reactions to public health recommendations. We show how shifting reliance on types of learning affect the course of an outbreak, and could therefore factor into policy-based interventions.

Strangers look sicker (with implications in times of COVID‐19)

“…The behavioral response of individuals to an epidemic is capable of altering its dynamics with catastrophic consequences. [ 58,59 ] The most effective measure to stop or slow down the spread of airborne diseases like COVID‐19 is to avoid person‐to‐person proximity (in conjunction with wearing masks whenever spatial or temporal separation is less than ideal, [ 60 ] which in places shared with others means virtually always [ 61,62 ] ). In the face of infection, social distancing is practiced in nature by mostly every species except superlatively social ones, such as bats [ 63 ] and mongooses, [ 64 ] where group members are connected so tightly that isolation might prove undesirable, and pathogen exposure is inevitable.…”

Improving pandemic mitigation policies across communities through coupled dynamics of risk perception and infection

“…Efforts to incorporate social [8], psychological [9] or economic [10] factors have revealed the profound effects of behavioural choices on projected outbreak dynamics [11,12]. Critically, however, many studies helping shape policy have considered behavioural factors as mostly uniform across the affected population and mostly constant throughout the course of an outbreak [13].…”

Homophily in risk and behavior complicate understanding the COVID-19 epidemic curve

“…Beyond mixing changes due to the holidays or weather-related behavior, there are also likely ongoing gradual changes in local adoption rates of mask wearing or social distancing, especially as local case incidence created greater local awareness of potential disease severity than may have been believed before direct observable outcomes due to differences in national reporting and media consumption (14)(15)(16)(17). These regional differences in behavior lead to differences in community vulnerability, causing a potential feedback loop between behavior and local outbreak severity (18).…”