Human Behaviors against COVID-19: A game theory approach and a case study of Iran

Human choices and prevention and control measures during the outbreaks of infectious diseases play an important role in mitigating the spread and burden of the diseases and the negative impact of such phenomenon on societies. In this study, we developed a static game theoretical approach to assess the impact of human responses to the personal protection strategies of vaccination, self-quarantine, wearing face masks and social distancing on the evolution of the COVID-19 pandemic burden. The model was set up such that an individual can choose multiple strategies to strike a balance between reducing the burden of the pandemic and not overrunning down their economies. A kind of static game analytics approach has been developed for this issue, and the proposed model has been implemented to design optimal intervention strategies for a sample of Iranian people in two critical phases in a serious battle against the COVID-19 pandemic. The results revealed that social distancing of exposed, susceptible, and recovered humans, self-quarantine of susceptible and infectious humans, and vaccination of exposed and recovered humans were more effective in mitigating the burden of the COVID-19 pandemic and limiting the transmission rate.