Social Dilemma Analysis of the Spread of Infectious Disease

Understanding and controlling the spread of infectious disease is a pressing issue for our society. Contemporary globally connected civilization is more at risk from various modern infectious diseases than classical ones such as pests, cholera, and tuberculosis. Over the last few years, pandemic outbreaks of highly virulent influenza, possibly related to avian flu, severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), and middle-eastern respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MARSE) have been a threat. Beyond this, the intentional spread of infectious disease, e.g., “bioterrorism”, has come to be recognized as being just as dangerous as nuclear weapons. An infectious disease spreads on human social networks. Each individual can protect himself through several measures. Pre-emptive vaccination is thought to be most effective, although it incurs a partial cost to each individual. This brings about a social dilemma, because an individual may be able to rely on so-called “herd immunity” to avoid his own infection without himself being vaccinated. Also, besides vaccination, there may be several practical ways to protect against contagion, such as wearing a mask, keeping away from crowds, and self-isolation by leaving the home less often, which may be less costly and less effective than vaccination. In any case, there is a human-decision-making process regarding what steps should be taken, while the dynamics of infectious-disease spread can themselves be evaluated as a diffusion problem that has been well-studied in physics for many years. Thus, based on the concept of human–environment–social interaction, a basic-physics model for this diffusion problem that considers evolutionary game theory (EGT) may lead us to obtain some meaningful solutions that can be proposed to our society. Following the previous chapter explaining how EGT can be applied to traffic-flow analysis, this chapter describes this practical problem.