Epidemics with behavior (Q2682800)

This paper investigates a model of epidemics that incorporates social distancing and show that modeling human behavior has clear consequences on the predicted trajectory of an infectious disease. A behavioral basic reproduction number is defined. It is shown that the disease propagates itself if and only if the behavioral basic reproduction number is larger than one. The results about the peak prevalence of the disease are derived. It is shown that an increase in the cost of distancing unequivocally leads to a reduction in distancing and to a higher peak prevalence of the disease. The results indicate that modeling individual distancing choices explicitly requires a care choice of modeling interventions. It is found that the possibly detrimental short-run effects of a decrease in the transmission rate disappear in the long run. The paper presents some numerical results to show that the non-monotonicity of peak prevalence in the transmission rate extends to that environment.