“In that case there is a significantly reduced risk of infection,” he said.īut there are always trade-offs and temptations to defect from the regimen. Bauch said, if everyone followed public health recommendations: They wore masks, socially distanced, washed their hands, followed stay-at-home orders. The pandemic presents an everyday complexity of such choices. This is what’s called a “prisoner’s dilemma game” - players weigh cooperation against betrayal, often producing a less than optimal outcome for the common good. Each individual has choices, but the payoff for each choice depends on choices made by others. The resulting study, led by their doctoral student Peter Jentsch and currently under peer review, looked at vaccination prioritization: To save the most lives, who should get the vaccine first?Īs infectious disease studies go, their methodology was somewhat atypical because it applied game theory, a mathematical way of modeling how people make strategic decisions within a group. Like many scientists, they redirected their research to Covid-19. “But here we were in the middle of a huge social experiment.” “Societal change is not the kind of thing you can easily experiment with,” Dr. Whereas those dynamics unfold slowly, the pandemic provided an acute example of rapid change. The couple’s collaborative research usually focuses on the interplay between human behavior and environment systems - for instance, with pollution, deforestation and climate change. Bauch runs a lab at the University of Waterloo. Anand is the director of the new Guelph Institute for Environmental Research at the University of Guelph, and Dr. Their offices at home are separated only by a wall, rather than a 45-minute drive. Madhur Anand, an ecologist, and her husband, Chris Bauch, a mathematical biologist, were optimally situated during the spring lockdown, working from home in Guelph, Ontario, to watch the pandemic play out - and to discuss patterns of behavior, within their community and beyond, as we all tried to keep safe and carry on.
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