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Optimal Management of Public Perceptions During A Flu Outbreak: A Game-Theoretic Perspective

Public perceptions and sentiments play a crucial role in the success of vaccine uptake in the community. While vaccines have proven to be the best preventive method to combat the flu, the attitude and knowledge about vaccines are a major hindrance to higher uptake in most of the countries. The yearl...

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Autores principales: Deka, Aniruddha, Pantha, Buddhi, Bhattacharyya, Samit
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Springer US 2020
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7563916/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33064223
http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11538-020-00817-9
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author Deka, Aniruddha
Pantha, Buddhi
Bhattacharyya, Samit
author_facet Deka, Aniruddha
Pantha, Buddhi
Bhattacharyya, Samit
author_sort Deka, Aniruddha
collection PubMed
description Public perceptions and sentiments play a crucial role in the success of vaccine uptake in the community. While vaccines have proven to be the best preventive method to combat the flu, the attitude and knowledge about vaccines are a major hindrance to higher uptake in most of the countries. The yearly coverage, especially in the vulnerable groups in the population, often remains below the herd immunity level despite the Flu Awareness Campaign organized by WHO every year worldwide. This brings immense challenges to the nation’s public health protection agency for strategic decision-making in controlling the flu outbreak every year. To understand the impact of public perceptions and vaccination decisions while designing optimal immunization policy, we model the individual decision-making as a two-strategy pairwise contest game, where pay-off is considered as a function of public health effort for the campaign. We use Pontryagin’s maximum principle to identify the best possible strategy for public health to implement vaccination and reduce infection at a minimum cost. Our optimal analysis shows that the cost of public health initiatives is qualitatively and quantitatively different under different public perceptions and attitudes towards vaccinations. When individual risk perception evolves with vaccine uptake or disease induced death, our model demonstrates a feed-forward mechanism in the dynamics of vaccination and exhibits an increase in vaccine uptake. Using numerical simulation, we also observe that the optimal cost can be minimized by putting the effort in the beginning and later part of the outbreak rather than during the peak. It confers that public health efforts towards disseminating disease severity or actual vaccination risk might accelerate the vaccination coverage and mitigate the infection faster.
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spelling pubmed-75639162020-10-16 Optimal Management of Public Perceptions During A Flu Outbreak: A Game-Theoretic Perspective Deka, Aniruddha Pantha, Buddhi Bhattacharyya, Samit Bull Math Biol Original Article Public perceptions and sentiments play a crucial role in the success of vaccine uptake in the community. While vaccines have proven to be the best preventive method to combat the flu, the attitude and knowledge about vaccines are a major hindrance to higher uptake in most of the countries. The yearly coverage, especially in the vulnerable groups in the population, often remains below the herd immunity level despite the Flu Awareness Campaign organized by WHO every year worldwide. This brings immense challenges to the nation’s public health protection agency for strategic decision-making in controlling the flu outbreak every year. To understand the impact of public perceptions and vaccination decisions while designing optimal immunization policy, we model the individual decision-making as a two-strategy pairwise contest game, where pay-off is considered as a function of public health effort for the campaign. We use Pontryagin’s maximum principle to identify the best possible strategy for public health to implement vaccination and reduce infection at a minimum cost. Our optimal analysis shows that the cost of public health initiatives is qualitatively and quantitatively different under different public perceptions and attitudes towards vaccinations. When individual risk perception evolves with vaccine uptake or disease induced death, our model demonstrates a feed-forward mechanism in the dynamics of vaccination and exhibits an increase in vaccine uptake. Using numerical simulation, we also observe that the optimal cost can be minimized by putting the effort in the beginning and later part of the outbreak rather than during the peak. It confers that public health efforts towards disseminating disease severity or actual vaccination risk might accelerate the vaccination coverage and mitigate the infection faster. Springer US 2020-10-16 2020 /pmc/articles/PMC7563916/ /pubmed/33064223 http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11538-020-00817-9 Text en © Society for Mathematical Biology 2020 This article is made available via the PMC Open Access Subset for unrestricted research re-use and secondary analysis in any form or by any means with acknowledgement of the original source. These permissions are granted for the duration of the World Health Organization (WHO) declaration of COVID-19 as a global pandemic.
spellingShingle Original Article
Deka, Aniruddha
Pantha, Buddhi
Bhattacharyya, Samit
Optimal Management of Public Perceptions During A Flu Outbreak: A Game-Theoretic Perspective
title Optimal Management of Public Perceptions During A Flu Outbreak: A Game-Theoretic Perspective
title_full Optimal Management of Public Perceptions During A Flu Outbreak: A Game-Theoretic Perspective
title_fullStr Optimal Management of Public Perceptions During A Flu Outbreak: A Game-Theoretic Perspective
title_full_unstemmed Optimal Management of Public Perceptions During A Flu Outbreak: A Game-Theoretic Perspective
title_short Optimal Management of Public Perceptions During A Flu Outbreak: A Game-Theoretic Perspective
title_sort optimal management of public perceptions during a flu outbreak: a game-theoretic perspective
topic Original Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7563916/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33064223
http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11538-020-00817-9
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