We’ve seen numerous disease outbreaks occur. The Ebola virus in West Africa, Cholera in Yemen, Hepatitis A in the United States to name a few. The spread of disease, which leads to major outbreaks is a very important and interesting topic. Everyone should make a conscientious effort to be well informed and take appropriate measures to prevent outbreaks .
When reading the title of this blog, one might wonder, How on Earth does game theory relate to disease outbreaks? In a recent article titled, “Game theory can help prevent disease outbreaks”, by authors Istvan Zoltan Kiss and Nicos Georgiou, they showed how game theory can and does play a big role in disease outbreak prevention.
When it comes to decisions about health, what’s best for us individually might not always be the best thing for the whole population, and vice versa. This leads to difficulty for authorities in making decisions to protect the populace. It’s easy to see how game theory ties into this problem.
A good example of this that the article talked about was the approach of having the population take vaccination, as shown in the image above. Vaccines have been proven safe, but they can have short-term negative effects such as, financial cost, pain from injection, a temporary reaction from the immune system. When deciding whether to get vaccinated, one has to weigh up these costs against the benefit of getting vaccinated to protect themselves from the disease. It might seem obvious to accept the costs and get vaccinated, but what if everybody else in the population gets vaccinated? You’d be relatively protected, so not getting vaccinated might appear to be the better choice. The problem with this is that if everyone thought like this then no one will be protected and a major disease outbreak could occur.
How would a best strategy in situations like this be determined? The article brings up the idea of Nash equilibrium. In some cases the optimal strategy for an individual can also be optimal for the population as well. The understanding of Nash equilibrium can help authorities in choosing strategies for disease outbreak prevention.
An example of this would be a situation where people from one area could choose whether to travel to another area affected by the disease or not. If the risk of disease was high because the outbreak was publicised in the news, individuals would logically choose not to travel. This would be beneficial with authorities in their desire for a travel ban to that area affected by the disease. Here, having the severity of the outbreak publicised in the news, helped tourists in implementing a travel ban, because they understood that an optimal strategy for individuals then would be to not travel.
Evidently, game theory can help in making sense of all the factors for finding out when individuals are most likely to act in a way that isn’t beneficial to the group. In response to that, authorities can then implement appropriate measure in order to decrease the chance of a disease outbreak.
References
https://theconversation.com/game-theory-can-help-prevent-disease-outbreaks-102934
https://www.contagionlive.com/news/the-10-biggest-infectious-disease-outbreaks-of-2017