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Outbreak – playable simulations of a disease outbreak

meltingasphalt.com

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Re: Outbreak – playable simulations of a disease outbreak

#61
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're also getting another classic part of any Pandemic play through cruise ships forever circling the ocean looking for a place to dock. https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/cruise-transatlantic-coro...

My favourite cruise ship fiasco this week has been the newly imposed rule in New Zealand - they can’t dock, go away. So hours before the ban was imposed one docked and dumped all it’s passengers in the capital. https://i.stuff.co.nz/national/health/coronavirus/120298962/...

You think that's bad?

A cruise with 200 people was denied port in Portugal, so the ship went to Spain, dropped all the passengers and they took busses to enter Portugal.

One of the many reasons why the border is being shut

Re: Outbreak – playable simulations of a disease outbreak

#63
post #45

We had a small demo to simulate pandemic outbreak at malls. The simulation was mostly for demonstration purposes to illustrate how distancing impacts spread, and potentially some ways to help mitigate it. http://socialdistance.ai/

Much less visual than yours though, I also made a tool to highlight the exponential effect of social distancing. Exponential growth is often counter-intuitive and lot of people don't seem to get it. https://www.spreadsim.com/

This is cool but your hospital beds figure needs to be reduced dramatically because I believe you have taken the number of total hospital beds, not intensive care beds for the critically ill. In my country, the number of total beds is about 48 times the number of intensive care beds.

Re: Outbreak – playable simulations of a disease outbreak

#64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My favourite cruise ship fiasco this week has been the newly imposed rule in New Zealand - they can’t dock, go away. So hours before the ban was imposed one docked and dumped all it’s passengers in the capital. https://i.stuff.co.nz/national/health/coronavirus/120298962/...

I got some stern comments that "laws should never apply retroactively" for saying this, but I still believe: all those border closings should apply immediately from the second they're announced, and all quarantine requirements for returning passengers should apply retroactively, from a day or two before they were announced. Because the story is the same all over the world. A country announces it'll close the borders…

The issue with immediate border closings is they create a lot of confusion. What happens to planes in the air or taking off or who does the policy actually apply to (see the initial iterations of the muslim ban where even the border agencies didn't have a consistent view of their own policy. The policy has to get out to the people at the border actually enforcing it too so it's either distributed early (meaning it will probably leak early and cause a rush then) or they only learn about it when everyone else does causing issues.

Re: Outbreak – playable simulations of a disease outbreak

#65
I am not a huge fan of this (or the WaPo) simulator, since I they seem to have chosen their models for the nice look (regular grid, bouncing balls) instead of for their accuracy.

While you can give people a rough idea of how different containment efforts will work, the models are so far removed from reality that I don't think that it really helps very much. Especially the WaPos'comparison' between different containment measures is IMHO borderline negligent without putting huge caveats in front of them.

Re: Outbreak – playable simulations of a disease outbreak

#66
post #7

How can I model the type of interaction between people. For example :is school a stronger vector of propagation than workplace ? I ask because everybody in my country talks about what to stop (restaurants, culture,...) but never explain why working is considered less of a problem... (I have my little idea but well, ain't sure)

This https://www.pnas.org/content/116/27/13174 is a good paper, it gives numbers from actual school closures (in Russia), compares with areas where schools weren't closed, creates models for some scenarios too. It would be interesting, possibly instructive to take a SIMS town and use it to model an epidemic.

Thx for the article. I've skimmed through it. Looks like closing schools averts 30% of cases. Not bad. But interestingly, in my country, I've never heard of a school closed because of influenza...

Re: Outbreak – playable simulations of a disease outbreak

#67

I am not a huge fan of this (or the WaPo) simulator, since I they seem to have chosen their models for the nice look (regular grid, bouncing balls) instead of for their accuracy. While you can give people a rough idea of how different containment efforts will work, the models are so far removed from reality that I don't think that it really helps very much. Especially the WaPos'comparison' between different containme…

Given how much normal people know about these issues (nothing whatsoever, or even less than nothing, somehow) I think the shortcomings of their model, vs. full physical simulation, is of no importance. It's a fantastic intuition-builder.

Re: Outbreak – playable simulations of a disease outbreak

#68
post #2

Anybody know an open source version of something like Plague Inc: Evolved ? I sure as hell am not playing computer games now. I'm going to get my crisis preparedness up properly and try to help my community. But it would be an interesting thing to have for the quarantine phase...

I'm a fan of Plague Inc on iOS and have unlocked all the pathogens...what's the difference between Plague Inc and Plague Inc Evolved? Is the latter worth buying and playing? Also: if there's a design doc out there for Plague Inc or a similar game, I'd love to see it.

A "design doc" would be the virtual lab where you can design your own scenario for Plague Inc Evolved. It is included in the Plague Inc Evolved game itself.

Re: Outbreak – playable simulations of a disease outbreak

#69
post #6

Remember pandemic2 flash game? It was almost impossible to kill all humans without starting the infection from Madagascar. If you started from somewhere else Madagascar always had time to close the borders. Lo and behold: Madagascar is one of the few countries without infections in Global Cases tracker. https://gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.h...

Or Plague Inc. on ios or android
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