New math model shows how testing decisions shape disease spread
Researchers have created a mathematical framework that predicts how people's willingness to get tested and isolate influences infectious disease outcomes. The model reveals critical feedback loops between behavior and disease dynamics that could help policymakers design more effective outbreak response strategies and predict which interventions actually work.
Originaltitel: A behaviour and disease model of testing and isolation
There has been interest in the interactions between infectious disease dynamics and behaviour for most of the history of mathematical epidemiology. This has included consideration of which mathematical models best capture each phenomenon, as well as their interaction, but typically in a manner that is agnostic to the exact behaviour in question. Here, we investigate interacting behaviour and disease dynamics specifically related to decisions around testing and isolation. To carry out our investigation we extend an existing "behaviour and disease" (BaD) model by incorporating the dynamics of symptomatic testing and isolation, including the influence of positive tests on perception of infection risk. We provide a dynamical systems analysis of the ordinary differential equations that define this model, providing theoretical results on its behaviour early in a new outbreak (particularly its basic reproduction number) and endemicity of the system (its steady states and associated stability criteria). We then supplement these findings with a numerical analysis to inform how temporal and cumulative outbreak metrics depend on the model parameter values for epidemic and endemic regimes. We observe novel model outputs such as epidemics that have more observed cases detected through increased testing, but are less objectively severe in terms of total number of infections.