The reaction to epidemics has actually been quite well studied although it’s not clear that ‘fatigue’ is the right way of understanding any potential decline in people’s compliance. This phrase doesn’t seem to be used in the medical literature in this context and it may well have been simply a convenient, albeit confusing, metaphor for ‘decline’ used in interviews.
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To cut a long story short, many, but not all, of these studies find that people tend to reduce their use of at least some preventative measures (like hand washing, social distancing) as the epidemic increases, and this has been looked at in various ways.
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In past pandemics, people started to drop their life-saving behavioural changes as the risk seemed to become routine, even as the actual danger increased.
This is not inevitable, because in some places, and in some outbreaks, people managed to stick with them.
From the blog post:
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