The Influence Of Social Behavior On Competition Between Virulent Pathogen Strains

Joe Pharaon; Chris T. Bauch

While the model discussed in this paper serves as a general framework for studying the influence of social 285 behaviour on strain competition and emergence, further research needs to be carried out to understand the 286 interplay between the epidemiological and social parameters. For instance, we did not model virulence evo-287 lution explicitly but rather by assuming two strains have already emerged due to mutation and addressing 288 conditions under which the more virulent mutant strain is more fit. Future research could instead model 289 virulence by defining transmission and recovery rates in terms of a virulence parameter, or by using an 290 adaptive dynamics approach. Future research could also explore different possible relationships between the 291 virulence parameters ν 1,2 and the perceived severity parameters ω 1,2 , or the interaction between social learn-292 ing timescales and pathogen evolutionary timescales. We did not study the influence of the social learning 293 parameter κ in this paper, but previous research on other socio-ecological and socio-epidemiological systems 294 suggests that the social learning rate can destabilize interior equilibria [39, 38] . A model that accounts 295 for multiple rounds of mutation would enable studying how pathogen evolutionary timescales interact with 296 11 . CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license is made available under a The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not peer-reviewed) is the author/funder. It . https://doi.org/10.1101/293936 doi: bioRxiv preprint social learning dynamics. Finally, we assumed no specific relationship between the perceived severity ω 1,2 and the virulence ν 1,2 although a non-trivial relationship certainly exists, and future research could explore 298 possible assumptions for their formal relationship.