Credit Mechanics of pandemics
#19,283
In January of 2020 - 6 weeks before the WHO declared COVID-19 a pandemic - we revisited the WHO's recently published 91-page NPI Guidance document and discussed some of the practical limitations of current pandemic planning (see No Pandemic Plan Survives Contact With A Novel Virus).
What emerged in China, and around the world with COVID, were emergency responses that ranged from draconian to laissez faire, sometimes alternating wildly between the two extremes.
And early on, overly optimistic messaging was that COVID wasn't `airborne', it wasn't likely transmitted asymptomatically, that infection produced durable immunity, that public masking was unnecessary, and that `herd immunity' would end the pandemic in a matter of months.
Many of these ideas were promoted long after scientific evidence emerged to the contrary. And it seemed, every country and every state was working from a different script.
Today, despite more than 15 million estimated deaths in the first 2 years, much of the world is in denial over the severity of the COVID pandemic, and believe they were somehow duped by their governments.
Sadly, the failures and mixed messaging from the last pandemic - along with the anti-science vitriol permeating social media - have only further eroded the ability of governments to deal with the next global health threat.
Some of this is obviously a self-inflicted wound. While some of it comes down the lack of any good options when dealing with any fast-moving, novel pathogen, which we'd never dealt with before.
To that end we have two overlapping pandemic-preparedness papers from Max Planck which look at the same problem from different perspectives. Both are long reads, and so I'll just briefly summarize them and provide links.Since another pandemic is considered inevitable, there is understandably considerable interest in developing better, more flexible, frameworks to deal with the next global health threat.
Seba Contrerasa,b,w Send email to seba.contreras@ds.mpg.de ∙ Philipp Döngesa,b,w ∙ Laura Müllera,b,w ∙ Piklu Mallicka,b,w ∙ Sydney Paltrac ∙ Ulrik Hvidd,e,a ∙ et al. Show moreSummaryCOVID-19 and previous pandemics have shown how diseases can disrupt, threaten, and transform daily life. Since pathogens and societies are continuously evolving, every pandemic is different. However, certain fundamental principles of disease transmission appear to hold true across different outbreaks. These “mechanisms” are grounded in natural laws or the very structure of our biology and societies.
This paper compiles ten fundamental mechanisms, curated by a multidisciplinary team with backgrounds spanning public health, medicine, epidemiology, political science, mathematics, physics, and psychology.
These mechanisms, although perhaps underappreciated, substantially shape how pandemics unfold and are controlled. The better we succeed in understanding these mechanisms and establishing this knowledge in our societies, the better we will be able to prepare for future pandemics and respond appropriately when they occur.
Scientists have compiled ten fundamental mechanisms governing the course of pandemics from various disciplinesMax-Planck-Gesellschaft
The second paper - Optimizing infectious disease mitigation under dynamic conditions - published in PNAS, uses mathematical models to weigh the estimated direct and indirect costs of infections against the assumed social, economic, and psychological costs of reducing transmission through NPIs.
Optimizing infectious disease mitigation under dynamic conditions
Laura Müller, Fabio Sartori, Jonas Dehning, +1 , and Viola Priesemann viola.priesemann@ds.mpg.deAuthors Info & Affiliations
Edited by Nils Chr. Stenseth, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway; received October 9, 2025; accepted June 26, 2026
August 3, 2026
123 (32) e2527395123
https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2527395123Significance
Managing a pandemic requires balancing competing costs: interventions such as mask mandates and lockdowns reduce infections but disrupt economies and social life, while uncontrolled spread imposes treatment costs and loss of productivity and well-being. We present a general framework for identifying optimal strategies that balance these trade-offs under realistic conditions, including seasonality and vaccination.
We uncover three key principles: i) interventions are best applied either very strictly or not at all, depending on disease severity; ii) anticipating seasonal changes shifts large outbreaks away from winter, reducing their impact; and iii) even with optimal mitigation, small infection waves can arise during vaccination. By providing both insights and practical tools, our approach offers a foundation for designing responses to future epidemics.
Abstract
Mitigation measures are essential for controlling the spread of infectious diseases during pandemics and epidemics, but they impose considerable societal, individual, and economic costs. We developed a general framework that combines simulation of disease dynamics with optimal control to determine mitigation strategies that balance infection and mitigation costs.
Optimizing this trade-off, we identified three surprising effects: first, assuming a constant reproduction number , the optimal response is typically “all-or-nothing”: depending on disease severity, either strict mitigation or none at all is optimal, with intermediate levels emerging only in restricted regimes that we characterize analytically. Second, under seasonal variations, optimal mitigation is stricter during winter. Interestingly, a single wave of infections still arises in spring, replacing the autumn/winter waves known for classical influenza. Third, during steady vaccination campaigns, even optimal mitigation can result in transient infection waves.
Finally, we quantify the cost of delayed mitigation onset and show that even short delays can substantially increase total costs—if the disease is severe. Overall, our framework is easily applicable to general and complex settings and thereby presents a versatile tool to explore optimal mitigation strategies for endemic and pandemic infectious disease.
Once again, you'll find a press release available at:
Optimal containment measures exhibit a clear threshold depending on the severity of the disease
While I confess to being less than optimistic about our global response to the next severe pandemic, I'm glad that some people are still working to improve our odds.
