Systems and Control Approaches for Modeling the Coevolution of Epidemics and Behavioral Response: A COVID-19 Case Study

The COVID-19 health crisis has highlighted how the collective behavioral response of a population --- for instance, the decision on whether to take up appropriate self-protective behaviors --- plays a critical role in shaping the outcome of an epidemic outbreak. Here, we briefly survey the seminal works and the state-of-the-art models proposed to capture and predict the complex and intertwined coevolutionary dynamics of epidemics and behavioral response, with a special focus on the methodological approaches proposed in the systems and control community. Then, we present and discuss a general framework to model such a coevolutionary dynamics and we illustrate its potentialities. Finally, we validate our modeling approach by presenting an implementation of the proposed framework tailored to capture the collective behavioral response to COVID-19, and we use such a parameterized model to discuss different what/if scenarios concerning the implementation of nonpharmaceutical interventions.