Ongoing debates on anti-COVID19 policies have been focused on coexistence vs. zero-out strategies, which can be simplified as ''always open (AO)'' vs. ''always closed (AC).'' We postulate that, the middle ground between the two extremes, dubbed LOHC (low-risk open and high-risk closed), is likely more favorable, precluding obviously irrational HOLC (high-open-low-closed). From a meta-strategy perspective, these four policies cover the full spectrum of anti-pandemic policies. We argue that, among numerous factors influencing strategic policy-making, the competence of advisory body such as CDC chief-scientist (say, Cindy) and politics in decision-making body such as president (David), and their cooperation/communication can be critical. Here we investigate anti-pandemic policy-making by harnessing the power of evolutionary game theory in modeling competition/cooperation/communication (three critical processes underlying biological and social evolutions). Specifically, we apply the Sir Philip Sydney (SPS) game, a 4x4 signaler-responder evolutionary game with 16 strategic interactions, which was devised to investigate the reliability of communication that can modulate competition and cooperation, to capture rich idiosyncrasies surrounding today's anti-pandemic policies. By emulating the reality of anti-pandemic policies today, the study aims to identify possible cognitive gaps and traps. The extended SPS, dubbed CDC (Cindy and David's Conversations) game, offers a powerful cognitive model for investigating the coexistence/zero-out dichotomy and possible alternatives. The rigorous analytic solutions and extensive simulations suggest a take-home message--keep it persistently simple and rational: while apparently preferred middle-ground LOHC seems to be small-probability (~0.05) event counter-intuitively, the AO and AC policies appears to be large-probability (~0.41-0.53) events.
CDC (Cindy and David's Conversations) Game: Advising President to Survive Pandemic