Shared tendencies between the adoption of masking sentiment and vaccine sentiment can determine the outcome of disease spread

In the last two decades, the impact of human health-related behavior on the spread of the disease has increased in prominence due to the proliferation of sentiment against public health-promoting behaviors such as vaccination and mask-wearing. The recent SARS-COV-2 pandemic brought these effects into sharp focus. Recently, coupled-contagion epidemiological models have been used to study the joint impact of human behavior and disease. These models treat sentiment towards a particular public health intervention as a contagion spreading in parallel to the disease itself. In this paper, we use a coupled-contagion model to study the interaction of two different health behaviors--vaccination and mask-wearing. In particular, we study how a positive or negative association between these behaviors--e.g. a pro-vaccine person may be more likely to be pro-mask-wearing--affects disease dynamics. We find that the strength of such an association alone can determine the outcome of disease spread in the short term and the long term. In addition to studying human health-related behaviors separately, it is vitally important to understand how these behaviors are associated with each other and how these associations affect the outcomes of epidemics.