CDC (Cindy and David’s Conversations) game: Advising President to survive pandemic

Ongoing debates on anti-COVID19 policies have been focused on coexistence-with versus zero-out (virus) strategies, which can be simplified as “always open (AO)” versus “always closed (AC).” We postulate that a middle ground, dubbed LOHC (low-risk-open and high-risk-closed), is likely favorable, precluding obviously irrational HOLC (high-risk-open and low-risk-closed). From a meta-strategy perspective, these four policies cover the full spectrum of anti-pandemic policies. By emulating the reality of anti-pandemic policies today, the study aims to identify possible cognitive gaps and traps by harnessing the power of evolutionary game-theoretic analysis and simulations, which suggest that (1) AO and AC seem to be “high-probability” events (0.412–0.533); (2) counter-intuitively, the middle ground—LOHC—seems to be small-probability event (0.053), possibly mirroring its wide adoptions but broad failures. Besides devising specific policies, an equally important challenge seems to deal with often hardly avoidable policy transitions along the process from emergence, epidemic, through pandemic, to endemic state.