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Incorporating Fear (un)Learning Mechanisms in Infectious Disease Modeling
Effective management of epidemics requires not only modeling the disease itself but also human responses to information, policies, and socioeconomic contexts. In this talk, we present an ODE model that considers the fear of disease and the fear of vaccines as contagions that occur alongside the disease. The mechanisms of fear acquisition and loss are obtained from neuroscientific theories of human behaviour adaptation, fear learning, transmission, and fear loss. We discuss how incorporating fear changes the disease dynamics and the effect of various fear-related parameters on the final state of the system. Our results show that the final size of the disease shows a sudden spike when the behaviour-related parameters exceed a certain threshold.