Game Theory of Reopening Schools During COVID-19
Article: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01826-x
During COVID-19; one of the largest topics of debates has been whether districts should restart in person schooling. Unlike colleges and universities, schools don’t have the resources to implement successful and consistent surveillance testing programs and children under the age of 12 cannot be vaccinated, creating a higher risk in schools. On the other hand of the spectrum, online learning is drastically less effective than traditional schooling. Students are falling behind, the achievement gap is widening, and some schools provide additional resources such as free lunch or aftercare to students that they do not receive at home.
Game theory is very applicable in this situation. Let’s take the situation where we have two “players” – the school and individual students. The “strategies” would be whether or not the school chooses to open and whether or not individual students wear masks and social distance (following COVID-19 guidelines set by the CDC). The “payoffs” would be measured in terms of the COVID-19 transmission rate within the school and how well students are catching up academically for where they need to be based on expert recommendations per grade level.
In this particular game, there are two potential Nash Equilibria. The first – if students choose to follow guidelines and the school reopens, the transmission rates will be low and students will get a better education. The second – students do not follow guidelines and schools remain closed. The other two options where schools are closed but students follow guidelines and schools are open but students aren’t following guidelines, aren’t good strategies because in the first case, schools would receive a lot of pushback from parents and would not be making best use of their resources and in the second case, the school is very likely to shut down again due to high transmission rates.
Despite these Nash Equilibria, however, currently we see a lot of cases where school districts are reopening and students choose not to wear a mask or follow guidelines. The reason why is because the game is being skewed based on the information individuals are exposed to regarding COVID-19 safety. Due to misinformation and the politicization of the pandemic, in some districts, the payoff of having the right to not mask or follow guidelines is significantly higher than the payoff from a low COVID-19 transmission rate. This shifts the Nash equilibrium. If these districts had full, correct information, we would not see a Nash Equilibrium where students aren’t following guidelines and schools are reopening.