The complex interplay between risk tolerance and the spread of infectious diseases

Risk-driven behaviour provides a feedback mechanism through which individuals both shape and are collectively affected by an epidemic. We introduce a general and flexible compartmental model to study the effect of heterogeneity in the population with regard to risk tolerance. The interplay between behaviour and epidemiology leads to a rich set of possible epidemic dynamics. Depending on the behavioural composition of the population, we find that increasing heterogeneity in risk tolerance can either increase or decrease the epidemic size. We find that multiple waves of infection can arise due to the interplay between transmission and behaviour, even without the replenishment of susceptibles. We find that increasing protective mechanisms such as the effectiveness of interventions, the fraction of risk-averse people in the population and the duration of intervention usage reduce the epidemic overshoot. When the protection is pushed past a critical threshold, the epidemic dynamics enter an underdamped regime where the epidemic size exactly equals the herd immunity threshold and overshoot is eliminated. Finally, we can find regimes where epidemic size does not monotonically decrease with a population that becomes increasingly risk-averse.