COVID-19 Social Distancing Simulator

Purpose

Social distancing is very important to containing COVID-19. However, admittedly at first, the risk for an individual might not seem that high.

This simulation aims for people to -- just like real life -- make a decision each day of social distancing or not and seeing the consequences of their actions to better understand the risk.

Doing this since I didn't see such a simulation, and wondering if an interactive way is useful in grappling the decisions one will need to make in real life.

The External Pitch

Each day, with the information you have, you have a choice:

• Should you leave home and do your regular routine, or stay at home?

Everyone else also has this choice and information, and may think similar to what you're thinking -- and your choice likely influences theirs. In this simulation, they think the exact same way you do. So if you think there's a small risk and have a 10% chance of staying at home, everyone else is also thinking as such.

What are the long-term consequences of this thinking as the virus spreads?

Note: This is not a scientific simulation and the numbers should not be trusted for any reason! It is purely for illustrative purposes.

Dev

Web App

• Start up a web server with python3 -m http.server
• Open up http://localhost:8000 in your browser

CLI

• With node >= v13 simply run: node ./main.js to run the javascript simulation
• Initially started with a CLI python prototype which can be run by python3 ./prototyping/sim.py

TODO

• Web client improvements
  • Improve intro explanation
  • Better data visuals (graphs, etc)
  • Generally way better UI/UX of course
• Simulation improvements
  • Potentially add model explanation