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.

中文翻译：

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流感爆发期间公众认知的优化管理：博弈论视角

公众的看法和情绪在社区成功接种疫苗方面发挥着至关重要的作用。虽然疫苗已被证明是对抗流感的最佳预防方法，但对疫苗的态度和知识是大多数国家提高疫苗接种率的主要障碍。尽管世卫组织每年在全世界组织流感宣传运动，但每年的覆盖率，特别是人口中的弱势群体，往往仍低于群体免疫水平。这给国家公共卫生保护机构每年控制流感爆发的战略决策带来了巨大挑战。为了在设计最佳免疫政策时了解公众看法和疫苗接种决策的影响，我们将个人决策建模为两个策略的配对竞赛游戏，回报被认为是该运动的公共卫生努力的一项功能。我们使用 Pontryagin 的最大原则来确定公共卫生的最佳策略，以最低成本实施疫苗接种和减少感染。我们的优化分析表明，在公众对疫苗接种的不同看法和态度下，公共卫生举措的成本在质量和数量上是不同的。当个体风险感知随着疫苗摄取或疾病引起的死亡而演变时，我们的模型展示了疫苗接种动态中的前馈机制，并显示出疫苗摄取的增加。使用数值模拟，我们还观察到，通过将努力放在爆发的开始和后期而不是在高峰期，可以最小化最佳成本。