  In fighting infectious diseases posing a global health threat, ranging from
influenza to Zika, non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPI), such as social
distancing and face covering, remain mitigation measures public health can
resort to. However, the success of NPI lies in sufficiently high levels of
collective compliance, otherwise giving rise to waves of infection incidences
that are not only driven by pathogen evolution but also changing vigilance in
the population. Here we show that compliance with each NPI measure can be
highly dynamic and context-dependent during an ongoing epidemic, where
individuals may prefer one to another or even do nothing, leading to intricate
temporal switching behavior of NPI adoptions. By characterizing dynamic regimes
through the perceived costs of NPI measures and their effectiveness in
particular regarding face covering and social distancing, our work offers new
insights into overcoming barriers in NPI adoptions.
