The Pandemic Waiting Game
“Honestly, I’m going to wait and see how the whole vaccine thing plays out. I’m not really at risk for COVID – I’d rather wait a year before I get jabbed.” When I worked as a teacher’s assistant for elementary school remote learning, I’d often have conversations with my older coworkers, debating whether the vaccine was worth getting before the children would arrive. I always felt uneasy when they brought up this “wait and see” game they’re playing, but I also lacked the language and ideas to formulate a convincing argument. A New York Times article by Siobhan Roberts put this feeling into words for me, using basic game theory concepts to explain people’s decisions on whether to get the vaccine or not.
Roberts states that we can model getting the vaccine or not as a game. People (when given the option to get vaccinated) will either choose to get vaccinated or not based on what they think benefits themselves the most. As the levels of infection lower and people are less anxious about the coronavirus, people will opt to ‘wait,’ out of fear, discomfort, or simply wanting to see how it affects other people before taking for themselves. However, if not very many people are getting the vaccine, and infection rates grow high, people will opt to get the vaccine (if they can) because their fear for the virus is stronger than that of the vaccine – again, it is from the individual’s perspective. But now, their ‘best strategy’ has changed. As the article phrases, this back-and-forth situation is like ‘a prisoner’s dilemma played out repeatedly.’ Do players (here, the general public) opt for their own comfort at the expense of general health, or vice versa? The strategy they will all opt for – this mutual best response, the Nash Equilibrium – will vary depending on what they value more at the time.
Thinking about the vaccine from one’s own point of view alone is dangerous for all of us – the people that make up society, and society itself. Roberts references mathematical biologist Chris Bauch, who explains why; “the ebb and flow between our behavior and the virus causes the pandemic waves.” If left to the game structure people naturally come up with, with the payoffs being one’s own stress, society will never fully move on from the pandemic as infection levels fluctuate up and down. To prevent this oscillation, the article urges the importance of redefining the vaccine game’s payoffs when marketing the vaccine. We must encourage people to get the vaccine because it is better for society. If we move the focus to the community’s benefit rather than the individual’s benefit, the ‘mutual best response’ that everyone will opt for – the Nash Equilibrium – will change as well. We will all be playing the same ‘game’ with the same idea of payoffs. Framing the pandemic and vaccine through game theory rather than just epidemiology, I understand how important perspective is when determining human behavior.
ARTICLE: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/20/health/virus-vaccine-game-theory.html