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.
> "To prevent the outbreak entering in Madagascar, all flights connecting Madagascar to Europe are suspended for 30 days," Madagascar President Hery Rajaonarimampianina said in a statement.
> Madagascar, one of the world's poorest nations where malnutrition is rife and outbreaks of deadly diseases are common, will also suspend air links to the nearby islands of La Reunion and Mayotte, he said.
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.
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.
If we're talking about disease-based games, I highly recommend Pathologic 2. Nothing realistic there in terms of modeling disease spread or cure mechanics, it's a very artistic and somewhat abstract game, but it conveys certain social realities of being in a contagion zone really well. Among other things, it show the importance of not collectively freaking out.
I second this recommendation. I'm currently playing through Pathologic 2 for the first time. Playing through the game in the wider context of a pandemic makes for a very powerful experience.
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)
Tell a child to stop touching things and see how many things they touch, where they put their fingers, how many times they pick their nose etc and then you'll know.
School is a bigger issues because children are usually are much closer together, are in the same room with far more people, and have far more interaction that adults at a typical job.
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.
Super fun: In the full model { 5%, 3%, 5, 3, 0.25, 5, 14 } led to a walking sprawl of disease in a healthy population that lasted a long time, turning down the incubation days by 2 made it slower. The rate of new infections eventually eventually tapered off because the virus encountered its own sprawl like a growing structure in Go. Seems like a STD.
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.
1) Cells should have random demographics such as male/female and age, and a virus could respond differently to them
2) The virus should have some capability for mutation as it spreads. (probability of changing variables from the initial configuration by some percent)
This stuff drives me crazy. I know the author of this (and of the linked Washington Post article) are trying to help people gain clarity, but it worries me that it only serves to accelerate fear and panic.
These articles are making it sound as if the exponential part of the curve will just continue on forever until it consumes the whole population. The (self-admittedly) overly simplified simulations aren't helping either.
Front this article >
And here's the kicker: even if we manage to "flatten the curve" enough to meaningfully space out the case load, we're still positioned to lose millions and millions of lives.
From the WaPo article >
This so-called exponential curve has experts worried. If the number of cases were to continue to double every three days, there would be about a hundred million cases in the United States by May.
Still, without any measures to slow it down, covid-19 will continue to spread exponentially for months. To understand why, it is instructive to simulate the spread of a fake disease through a population.
It will continue to spread exponentially for months!? Millions & millions of cases & or deaths? These are really sloppy and dangerous ideas to put in peoples head. They are just plain wrong, and not how pandemics play out in reality.
Pandemics of respiratory disease follow a certain progression outlined in a “Pandemic Intervals Framework.” Pandemics begin with an investigation phase, followed by recognition, initiation, and acceleration phases. The peak of illnesses occurs at the end of the acceleration phase, which is followed by a deceleration phase, during which there is a decrease in illnesses. Different countries can be in different phases of the pandemic at any point in time and different parts of the same country can also be in different phases of a pandemic.
Different parts of the country are seeing different levels of COVID-19 activity. The United States nationally is currently in the initiation phases, but states where community spread is occurring are in the acceleration phase. The duration and severity of each phase can vary depending on the characteristics of the virus and the public health response.
So no, it will NOT continue exponentially for months. Especially given the amount of isolation/ quarantine measures and canceling of large events taking place. I think it is reasonable to expect these measures will help us progress through to the deceleration phase faster.
Further-more, there is more and more evidence coming out suggesting the in China where it started, they have already entered the deceleration phase. This should be encouraging news for us in USA where it is just beginning.
The CDC link is interesting stuff I haven't read before, but where does it say the acceleration phase stops before it reaches a significant percentage of the population? China contained and stopped the virus, it didn't just naturally decelerate.
What happens once China starts dismantling mitigations currently in place, given that the majority of the population is still naive to the virus? Is it reasonable to expect they can wait out the virus disappearing completely by tracking all active cases until they have recovered?
To be fair, the WaPo article is laced with caveats like ”without any measures to slow it down”, or ”If the number of cases were to continue to double every three days”. But there ARE measures to slow it down, and it certainly WON’T continue to double every three days.
This is really my gripe with these articles. I like the tech. The interactive ’simulations’ are cool & fun. But I worry they are only adding to the panic and confusion. I’ve had close friends spout ‘facts’ like this to me. Stuff like 60-70 of the population will be infected by the time it’s done.
Very cool. Shouldn't the input transmission rate also be fixed for the last "test" ? It says to try to flatten the curve to reduce the % dead, but being able to control the transmission rate is cheating.
One of the first downloadable objects for The Sims 1 was a pet guinea pig, which literally had a downloadable computer virus.
If you neglected to feed and care for your guinea pig properly, it would bite you and give you a deadly contagious virus, which you could spread to other Sims by not following proper hygiene and getting enough rest, and even die from.
Kids who downloaded the binary Sims object from the internet and installed in their game were horrified that their beloved Sims dropped dead unexpectedly, but they learned a useful lesson.
Now deadly infectious guinea pigs are a tradition continued in later versions of The Sims!
>You can download this guinea pig object, and if you don’t care for it it will make this secret hidden virus object that gives you a cold, and has with it the animations and sounds of coughing and going (cough cough).
>Every once in a while it will just interrupt what you do and cough, and it will be bad for your health. And if you don’t get enough sleep, you have to get sleep to get rid of it.
This little program is literally a virus that runs and lives in your household and in your characters, and your characters can spread them to the neighbors, and they’ll bring them home to their families.
>Programmable Plug-In Objects
>Anyway, there’s quite a lot of interesting potential for what new plug-ins additions can do because of this programming languages.
>SimAntics Visual Programming Language
>There’s a built-in visual programming language called SimAntics, that is a control flow decision tree type of language. So the “Come and See” object, we’ll look at that.
A powerful boss in World of Warcraft could afflict the player with a plague called "Corrupted Blood", which rapidly drained your HP and could spread to nearby allies. The negative status effect was supposed to apply only in its zone of origin, but due to the way it was implemented, a player accidentally spread it outside its containment zone by dismissing and then re-summoning a pet with the effect, allowing it to spread. All hell broke loose on Azeroth, as entire cities would be contaminated with Corrupted Blood, and were subsequently abandoned or avoided by the remaining healthy players. Some players with healer-class characters would heal their allies and random strangers until the affliction passed. Others deliberately spread the affliction as a form of griefing. It was bananas, and epidemiologists used it as a model for possible human behavior in a real-life plague.
Interesting simulation but very slow at showing any effect. After 3500+ iterations (several minutes) there were still only 5 deaths in the first simulator (without distancing), all in the first iterations. I suggest to find a way to make it clear when it's done or speed it up to get to the point in one minute max.
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...
[+] [-] nabla9|6 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] knzhou|6 years ago|reply
https://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2020/03/14/world/africa/14re...
> "To prevent the outbreak entering in Madagascar, all flights connecting Madagascar to Europe are suspended for 30 days," Madagascar President Hery Rajaonarimampianina said in a statement.
> Madagascar, one of the world's poorest nations where malnutrition is rife and outbreaks of deadly diseases are common, will also suspend air links to the nearby islands of La Reunion and Mayotte, he said.
[+] [-] rtkwe|6 years ago|reply
https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/cruise-transatlantic-coro...
[+] [-] muzani|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Aardwolf|6 years ago|reply
https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/448950
[+] [-] Ntrails|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] james_s_tayler|6 years ago|reply
Turns out it's true.
[+] [-] minitoar|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rusticpenn|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DonHopkins|6 years ago|reply
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y69QTjTvp1w
[+] [-] simcop2387|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jointpdf|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] oceanofsolaris|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] shanusmagnus|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gambler|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] feu|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wiz21c|6 years ago|reply
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)
[+] [-] brigandish|6 years ago|reply
It'll only take a few minutes.
[+] [-] JamesBarney|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pbhjpbhj|6 years ago|reply
It would be interesting, possibly instructive to take a SIMS town and use it to model an epidemic.
[+] [-] gringoDan|6 years ago|reply
Source: https://samharris.org/podcasts/190-respond-coronavirus/
[+] [-] baq|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ISNIT|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] boxfire|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] and0rsk|6 years ago|reply
http://socialdistance.ai/
[+] [-] paraboul|6 years ago|reply
Exponential growth is often counter-intuitive and lot of people don't seem to get it.
https://www.spreadsim.com/
[+] [-] xwdv|6 years ago|reply
1) Cells should have random demographics such as male/female and age, and a virus could respond differently to them
2) The virus should have some capability for mutation as it spreads. (probability of changing variables from the initial configuration by some percent)
[+] [-] AlexDanger|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 40four|6 years ago|reply
These articles are making it sound as if the exponential part of the curve will just continue on forever until it consumes the whole population. The (self-admittedly) overly simplified simulations aren't helping either.
Front this article >
And here's the kicker: even if we manage to "flatten the curve" enough to meaningfully space out the case load, we're still positioned to lose millions and millions of lives.
From the WaPo article >
This so-called exponential curve has experts worried. If the number of cases were to continue to double every three days, there would be about a hundred million cases in the United States by May.
Still, without any measures to slow it down, covid-19 will continue to spread exponentially for months. To understand why, it is instructive to simulate the spread of a fake disease through a population.
It will continue to spread exponentially for months!? Millions & millions of cases & or deaths? These are really sloppy and dangerous ideas to put in peoples head. They are just plain wrong, and not how pandemics play out in reality.
Here is what the CDC says about how pandemics spread (Under the 'COVID-19 Now a Pandemic' heading) https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/summ...
Pandemics of respiratory disease follow a certain progression outlined in a “Pandemic Intervals Framework.” Pandemics begin with an investigation phase, followed by recognition, initiation, and acceleration phases. The peak of illnesses occurs at the end of the acceleration phase, which is followed by a deceleration phase, during which there is a decrease in illnesses. Different countries can be in different phases of the pandemic at any point in time and different parts of the same country can also be in different phases of a pandemic.
Different parts of the country are seeing different levels of COVID-19 activity. The United States nationally is currently in the initiation phases, but states where community spread is occurring are in the acceleration phase. The duration and severity of each phase can vary depending on the characteristics of the virus and the public health response.
So no, it will NOT continue exponentially for months. Especially given the amount of isolation/ quarantine measures and canceling of large events taking place. I think it is reasonable to expect these measures will help us progress through to the deceleration phase faster.
Further-more, there is more and more evidence coming out suggesting the in China where it started, they have already entered the deceleration phase. This should be encouraging news for us in USA where it is just beginning.
https://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/newsfeed/2020/03/big-dr...
[+] [-] svachalek|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] feanaro|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 40four|6 years ago|reply
To be fair, the WaPo article is laced with caveats like ”without any measures to slow it down”, or ”If the number of cases were to continue to double every three days”. But there ARE measures to slow it down, and it certainly WON’T continue to double every three days.
This is really my gripe with these articles. I like the tech. The interactive ’simulations’ are cool & fun. But I worry they are only adding to the panic and confusion. I’ve had close friends spout ‘facts’ like this to me. Stuff like 60-70 of the population will be infected by the time it’s done.
[+] [-] saberdancer|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] daenz|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] DonHopkins|6 years ago|reply
If you neglected to feed and care for your guinea pig properly, it would bite you and give you a deadly contagious virus, which you could spread to other Sims by not following proper hygiene and getting enough rest, and even die from.
Kids who downloaded the binary Sims object from the internet and installed in their game were horrified that their beloved Sims dropped dead unexpectedly, but they learned a useful lesson.
Now deadly infectious guinea pigs are a tradition continued in later versions of The Sims!
The Sims Pie Menus
https://medium.com/@donhopkins/the-sims-pie-menus-49ca02a74d...
>Viruses
>You can download this guinea pig object, and if you don’t care for it it will make this secret hidden virus object that gives you a cold, and has with it the animations and sounds of coughing and going (cough cough).
>Every once in a while it will just interrupt what you do and cough, and it will be bad for your health. And if you don’t get enough sleep, you have to get sleep to get rid of it. This little program is literally a virus that runs and lives in your household and in your characters, and your characters can spread them to the neighbors, and they’ll bring them home to their families.
>Programmable Plug-In Objects
>Anyway, there’s quite a lot of interesting potential for what new plug-ins additions can do because of this programming languages.
>SimAntics Visual Programming Language
>There’s a built-in visual programming language called SimAntics, that is a control flow decision tree type of language. So the “Come and See” object, we’ll look at that.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-exdu4ETscs&t=12m23s
Something Is Killing the Sims, and It's No Accident. By John Markoff, April 27, 2000.
https://www.nytimes.com/2000/04/27/technology/something-is-k...
Lethal guinea pig kills virtual people
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/sci/tech/746700.stm
The Sims 1: Guinea Pig Disease
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5O5cgXuqhnA
The Sims / Illness / Guinea Pig Disease
https://sims.fandom.com/wiki/Illness
How to Get and Treat Guinea Pig Disease
https://sims-online.com/how-to-get-treat-guinea-pig-disease/
The Sims 4 My First Pet: SimGuruGraham Talks “Guinea Pig” Disease
https://simsvip.com/2018/03/07/the-sims-4-my-first-pet-simgu...
[+] [-] bitwize|6 years ago|reply
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corrupted_Blood_incident
[+] [-] Swizec|6 years ago|reply
https://reactfordataviz.com/articles/corona-simulation/
[+] [-] pmontra|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] olliej|6 years ago|reply
e.g. say that there are X hospital beds, and an X% survival rate for critical patients if they can get a bed.
[+] [-] etiam|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] veeralpatel979|6 years ago|reply
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.