Vaccination games in prevention of infectious diseases with application to COVID-19

Vaccination coverage is crucial for disease prevention and control. An appropriate combination of compulsory vaccination with voluntary vaccination is necessary to achieve the goal of herd immunity for some epidemic diseases such as measles and COVID-19. A mathematical model is proposed that incorporates both compulsory vaccination and voluntary vaccination, where a decision of voluntary vaccination is made on the basis of game evaluation by comparing the expected returns of different strategies. It is shown that the threshold of disease invasion is determined by the reproduction numbers, and an over-response in magnitude or information interval in the dynamic games could induce periodic oscillations from the Hopf bifurcation. The theoretical results are applied to COVID-19 to find out the strategies for protective immune barrier against virus variants.