  Most governments employ a set of quasi-standard measures to fight COVID-19
including wearing masks, social distancing, virus testing, contact tracing, and
vaccination. However, combining these measures into an efficient holistic
pandemic response instrument is even more involved than anticipated. We argue
that some non-trivial factors behind the varying effectiveness of these
measures are selfish decision making and the differing national implementations
of the response mechanism. In this paper, through simple games, we show the
effect of individual incentives on the decisions made with respect to mask
wearing, social distancing and vaccination, and how these may result in
sub-optimal outcomes. We also demonstrate the responsibility of national
authorities in designing these games properly regarding data transparency, the
chosen policies and their influence on the preferred outcome. We promote a
mechanism design approach: it is in the best interest of every government to
carefully balance social good and response costs when implementing their
respective pandemic response mechanism; moreover, there is no one-size-fits-all
solution when designing an effective solution.
