The social dynamics of COVID-19

We add a simple dynamic process for adaptive "social distancing" measures to a standard SIR model of the COVID pandemic. With a limited attention span and in the absence of a consistent long-term strategy against the pandemic, this process leads to a sweeping of an instability, i.e. fluctuations in the effective reproduction number around its bifurcation value of $$ . While mitigating the pandemic in the short-run, this process remains intrinsically fragile and does not constitute a sustainable strategy that societies could follow for an extended period of time.