Modeling individual self-protective behavior during epidemics
Fig 10
Simulation results comparing the outcomes of the baseline scenario (blue curve) with those of alternative vaccination policies: open eligibility (top), high-exposure priority (middle), and low-resource priority (bottom).
The results show that, under our simulation settings, alternative scenarios outperform age-based vaccine prioritization by enabling higher vaccine administration during the early stage. This leads to a smaller peak in new cases. Although the alternative policies delay vaccination for populations at higher risk of severe outcomes, they more effectively reduce overall disease spread by mitigating transmission among high-exposure populations and those with limited resources, who may have lower motivation for self-protection. Notably, the impact is limited to the faster distribution of vaccines to the willing population and does not change the total number of individuals willing to be vaccinated. This leads to convergence in vaccination trends around t = 400.