Individual costs and societal benefits of interventions during the COVID-19 pandemic

Individual and societal reactions to an ongoing pandemic can lead to social dilemmas: In some cases, each individual is tempted to not follow an intervention, but for the whole society it would be best if they did. Now that in most countries the extent of regulations to reduce SARS-CoV-2 transmission is very small, inter-ventions are driven by individual decision-making. Assuming that individuals act in their best own interest, we propose a framework in which this situation can be quantified, depending on the protection the intervention provides to a user and to others, the risk of getting infected, and the costs of the intervention. We discuss when a tension between individual and societal benefits arises and which parameter comparisons are important to distinguish between different regimes of intervention use. ### Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest. ### Funding Statement SAL acknowledges funding by the NSF (grants CCF-2142997, CNS-2041952, and CCF1917819). CMSR acknowledges funding from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada via a Postgraduate Scholarship-Doctoral, Princeton University via a Charlotte Elizabeth Procter Fellowship, and the Miller Institute for Basic Research in Science of UC Berkeley via a Miller Research Fellowship. ### Author Declarations I confirm all relevant ethical guidelines have been followed, and any necessary IRB and/or ethics committee approvals have been obtained. Yes I confirm that all necessary patient/participant consent has been obtained and the appropriate institutional forms have been archived, and that any patient/participant/sample identifiers included were not known to anyone (e.g., hospital staff, patients or participants themselves) outside the research group so cannot be used to identify individuals. Yes I understand that all clinical trials and any other prospective interventional studies must be registered with an ICMJE-approved registry, such as ClinicalTrials.gov. I confirm that any such study reported in the manuscript has been registered and the trial registration ID is provided (note: if posting a prospective study registered retrospectively, please provide a statement in the trial ID field explaining why the study was not registered in advance). Yes I have followed all appropriate research reporting guidelines and uploaded the relevant EQUATOR Network research reporting checklist(s) and other pertinent material as supplementary files, if applicable. Yes All data produced in the present work are contained in the manuscript