David Haw (University of Liverpool)

Integrating economics and behaviour into disease transmission modelling

The COVID -19 pandemic has clearly shown that the burden of a pandemic extends beyond health into wealth, lost years of education and limited personal freedoms. We offer a modelling framework that explicitly describes the interplay between these phenomena, with the aim to derive mitigation protocols that are optimised for a desired. The original version of this model required arbitrary assumptions regarding changes in adherence to non-pharmaceutical interventions such as mask wearing, which limits the model’s predictive power. We offer a new approach to integrated modelling that is centred around behavioural heterogeneity in which all drivers of change in transmission are intrinsic and thus can be calibrated to epidemiological data. This motivates a new direction in epidemiology, driven by behavioural economics.