Department of Mathematics, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, 10 Xitucheng Road, Beijing, 100876, China.
International School, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Beijing, 100876, China.
Math Biosci. 2024 Nov;377:109288. doi: 10.1016/j.mbs.2024.109288. Epub 2024 Aug 31.
In the wake of epidemics, quarantine measures are typically recommended by health authorities or governments to help control the spread of the disease. Compared with mandatory quarantine, voluntary quarantine offers individuals the liberty to decide whether to isolate themselves in case of infection exposure, driven by their personal assessment of the trade-off between economic loss and health risks as well as their own sense of social responsibility and concern for public health. To better understand self-motivated health behavior choices under these factors, here we incorporate voluntary quarantine into an endemic disease model - the susceptible-infected-susceptible (SIS) model - and perform comprehensive agent-based simulations to characterize the resulting behavior-disease interactions in structured populations. We quantify the conditions under which voluntary quarantine will be an effective intervention measure to mitigate disease burden. Furthermore, we demonstrate how individual decision-making factors, including the level of temptation to refrain from quarantine and the degree of social compassion, impact compliance levels of voluntary quarantines and the consequent collective disease mitigation efforts. We find that successful disease control requires either a sufficiently low level of temptation or a sufficiently high degree of social compassion, such that even complete containment of the epidemic is attainable. In addition to well-mixed populations, we have also analyzed other more realistic social networks of contacts, including spatial lattices, small-world networks, and real social networks. Our work offers new insights into the fundamental social dilemma aspect of disease control through non-pharmaceutical interventions, such as voluntary quarantine and isolation, where the collective outcome of individual decision-making is crucial.
在疫情爆发后，卫生当局或政府通常会建议采取检疫措施，以帮助控制疾病的传播。与强制检疫相比，自愿检疫为个人提供了自由决定是否在感染暴露的情况下自我隔离的权利，这是基于个人对经济损失和健康风险之间权衡的个人评估，以及他们自身的社会责任感和对公共卫生的关注。为了更好地理解这些因素下的自我激励健康行为选择，我们在这里将自愿检疫纳入地方性疾病模型——易感-感染-易感（SIS）模型，并进行全面的基于主体的模拟，以描述结构人群中由此产生的行为-疾病相互作用。我们量化了自愿检疫将成为减轻疾病负担的有效干预措施的条件。此外，我们展示了个人决策因素，包括避免检疫的诱惑程度和社会同情心的程度，如何影响自愿检疫的遵守水平以及由此产生的集体疾病缓解努力。我们发现，成功的疾病控制需要要么诱惑程度足够低，要么社会同情心足够高，这样即使完全控制疫情也是可行的。除了均匀混合的人群外，我们还分析了其他更现实的接触社交网络，包括空间晶格、小世界网络和真实社交网络。我们的工作通过非药物干预措施，如自愿检疫和隔离，为疾病控制的基本社会困境方面提供了新的见解，其中个人决策的集体结果至关重要。
