As scientists and doctors fight coronavirus itself, the biggest challenge for government will become managing this second epidemic—the spread of fear and also its retreat, which can sometimes be even riskier
Joshua M. Epstein is a professor of epidemiology at New York University’s School of Global Public Health and director of the NYU Agent-Based Modeling Lab. He is an external professor at the Santa Fe Institute.
To get the world back on track requires controlling all four horsemen of the Covid-19 apocalypse—which makes the response far more complicated than leaders seem to appreciate. Fatiguing and costly as it will be, we must not repeat this mistake out of zeal to reopen the economy. Instead, we need to use what we know—from biology, from experience, and also from new tools to model human behavior—to guide our response. Here’s where they point us now.
Fauci has recently estimated that between 100,000 and 200,000 Americans will die in the course of the epidemic. If you assume that 2% of infected people will die, then to end up with 100,000 deaths, you must have 5,000,000 infected people. If, as we estimate, 36 percent of those can work, you get an immune labor force of 1.8 million. At Fauci’s higher figure of 200,000 deaths, you get a workforce of 3.6 million.
What do the models show? With Erez Hatna at the NYU School of Global Public Health and Jennifer Crodelle of the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at NYU, we have extended the coupled-contagion model discussed above, adding a third contagion, of vaccine fear. Everything turns on the relationship between the two fears, one of disease, the other of vaccine. In our model, if fear of disease exceeds fear of vaccine, then vaccine acceptance rises and the disease is suppressed.
My own NYU Lab specializes in “agent-based modeling” to figure out how real people respond to crises. Essentially, we build artificial societies of cognitively plausible software people who interact on computer-simulated landscapes to generate, or “grow,” all sorts of social and economic dynamics, including epidemics.
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