First, this URL https://covidgame.info/ loads the game in English by default. There was a plan to popularize the game outside of Czechia but, frankly, we missed the window when major news outlets were interested.
To address few points mentioned in the comments: the game was tuned to the specific situation in Czech Republic around end of 2020 / beginning 2021. The goal was to build basic quantitative intuition about the behavior of the epidemiological model (SEIR model) that the general public and decision makers were lacking. The game doesn't allow for zero covid strategy - because that was never realistically considered. Likewise, we after some considerations, we didn't include cheap interventions like extensive testing, contact tracing and better government communication. This doesn't mean that we didn't support such interventions. However, Czech government proved unwilling or incapable to implement such measures and in the short/medium term broad restrictions were the only "levers" the decision makers could pull.
We were working together with some real experts in Covid modelling and the model was in my opinion quantitatively sound (though, as we repeatedly said, the model was not optimized for scientific accuracy). At the end the was played by some members of the parliament, party experts and even ministers. We know that the game helped to facilitate consensus between the government and opposition in a very fragile political situation. I believe that, at the end, the game saved hundreds or thousands lives by helping to implement some necessary restrictions sooner than they'd be implemented otherwise.
Wonderful, sparse, essential simulation. The stark choices and the resulting reminders of what really happened (and how the player matches up) is a great eye-opener for the general public. The fact that it forces you to make decisions in realtime and feel the lag behind them is really brilliant as a thing to put in front of decision-makers in parliament. One of the most difficult things with covid was the inability to see a few weeks into the future, because our minds are not equipped to think in terms of exponentially multiplying consequences. This gives a really elegant, intuitive form to a very conceptually difficult set of variables.
The beauty of the concept is its simplicity, as well. It's a bit like an IFR training panel, or early text-based video games. You can't see where the plane is or where it's going, you only see the instrument readouts after you adjust something. Since we have all been flying blind, this is a great experience to put in front of people, simply of what it's like to adjust and wait.
Five stars, sending it to all the devs I know, also as a way to make a very engaging sim on a complex topic for people with no prior art =D
Astral Codex Ten (the reincarnated Slate Star Codex) has an informative article on the effectiveness of lockdowns that references and employs this simulation:
Meta question to the author about the spread of information: you registered your account a few hours ago apparently to post answers here, how did you know that your game was on HN?
[game author here]
Note that I am Czech living in the US. Czech Republic and USA are the countries I follow most though I had discussions with other (mostly European expats).
Note on the "social stability score": the game population is by design very "permissive" people will generally not revolt even if you implement very harsh lockdowns of if many people die. This is because we primarily wanted to allow the player to explore the epidemiological model even for fairly extreme strategies (and public opinion is hard to model anyways). In addition, we expect that most player will play the game only once and we didn't want to frustrate too many new players by "game over" screens.
For context: here is how I see what was happening in Czechia. The spring 2020 was handled well and country avoided any significant surge in Covid cases. During summer 2020, people get used to the pandemic. New view got a significant traction: Covid is not that serious and the best course was to let it sweep through the population and gain natural herd immunity.
Since then, there was a constant tug of war between side wishing to relax the rules and the side wishing for stricter rules. Every time the disease started to decline, the "relax rules" side gained more traction and every time the hospitals were close to the capacity (or arguably above the capacity), the government implemented fairly strict measures (there was a strong consensus that everybody must be able to get healthcare).
This explains why the popular "zero covid" and "no intervention" strategies were never attempted. It is hard to tell how well our model works for these strategies. My guess is "not too poorly" but the we have much better confidence in the model in the regime much closer to real world behavior of the country.
Coolio! :)
I built something similar [0] a while ago. My goal was to _visually_ demonstrate how fast a virus can spread. I wanted to make it is easy for everyone to get an understanding about exponential growth and how different measures can have a great impact on the spread of a virus.
Disclaimer: This is an unpolished toy project. It was built in a weekend by simple dude who likes to code but has no idea about virology and epidemiology.
Let me also link a post from one of our collaborators explaining how, for most countries, the dichotomy between saving lives and economy was somewhat false and relative to the real outcomes it was possible to improve both: https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https...
A lot of the discussion on this forum center around the question what was the optimal policy and how well the game simulated that policy. In particular, there is a lot of discussion around the two "extreme" approaches: "zero covid" and "no interventions". That is fine, we had these discussions many times and we can explain how these approaches are represented in the game (in my opinion, not too unrealistically) but, at the same time, it somewhat misses the point. The game was about building intuition about simple epidemiological SEIR model close to the regime where the real country was operating - and for political reasons it was very unlikely that the country will radically change the course.
Lot of the game design decisions were some compromise between different goals of the game. Let me give an example: the team of authors of the game strongly believes that expanding contract tracing would a good thing. We were considering adding it to the game. However, what would be a point of adding that option to the game? It would further clutter UI (we had mobile users on mind). It would not add anything to the game because the decision to expand tracing would have no significant downside. And last it would hardly add anything to the public debate, it would just communicate that the authors of the game like contact tracing. There were already zillion of well argued opinion pieces on the topic. In fact, failures of contact tracing were more about failures of the specific agency than any conscious decision on the decision maker side. In short, tacking this issue in the game would quickly move from mathematical modeling into much more murky waters of public service efficiency.
You should also keep in mind that the game was just a small piece in a bigger mosaic of truly incredible efforts of many other volunteers. E.g. "Interdisplinary group for epidemic situations" https://www.meses.cz/. The game was never intended to provide comprehensive picture or recommendations.
> The game doesn't allow for zero covid strategy - because that was never realistically considered.
The game should model this because it is the only strategy that has been shown to be actually effective, and might make people realise how badly governments handled this.
I'm not sure how to feel about this simulation... I basically did nothing and burned through COVID within 3 months and things went back to normal by mid-summer. By the end of the year, despite mid-summer government confidence being terrible, I was told "The people trust the government" with a 70% approval. I mean I killed what 10% of the country, but hey... the people have short memories!
What is this supposed to be teaching exactly?
If the model is correct then I think a lot of people would say we should have just let the disease burn out and deal with the deaths. I'm not sure that's what the designers intended.
I'm not sure it wouldn't have worked. Sweden had something like 80% support to only have event limits at 500 and no other restrictions, with people arguing in public forums that those dying deserved it and that it was worth it.
I had a doctor outright scold me for wearing a mask to the hospital here (checkup for crohns disease which I take immunosupressants for) and didnt see a single other mask in the hospital until December 2020. o.O.
Smaller countries with limited access to the wider discussions in English can turn very weird.
Even in a worst case scenario it would be impossible to kill 10% of the country. The worldwide infection fatality rate is under 1%. That would rise a little of the healthcare system was overwhelmed but getting to 10% isn't remotely plausible.
If the two metrics used are loss of life vs cost of pandemic, the cost of a life needs to be included in the final score I think.
In Australia, it appears some early models predicted between 50k to 150k lives lost assuming no response. A statistical life is valued at over $4m, meaning a cost of $200bn to $600bn. Also, with 60% of the population infected, that would mean over 12 million people infected - we still don't have a good idea what the long-term issues will be - but one study in Australia found ~5% of people experiencing "long covid" symptoms, which would mean at least 600,000 people with long-term complications - which in our hypothetical Harkonnen society we'd likely just shove them into a hole somewhere and forget about them, otherwise we'd have to deal with their social welfare (yuck!) and strain on the health system.
No doubt the cost, responses, short and long term impacts, etc, will be something economists and sociologists will debate for decades to come.
Edit: On thinking about it, I think the value of life is based on insurance / compensation purposes, perhaps the value of a life in terms of total GDP contribution would be different? Anyway, a subject more for the actuaries and economists I think. Interesting to consider nonetheless, which I think may be the overall point of this game.
I doubt this - it is impossible to kill 10% of the population in the game. As anyone can see on the final screen, max number of deaths in the game is about 150000, which is 1.5% (Czechia population is approximately 10M)
[game author here]
Worst case scenario in the game is ~1.5% of the population. The estimated fatality rate is 0.5%. This number is increased to 1% if the hospitals are overwhelmed (note that there was a strong consensus in the country that this needs to be avoided).
Note that only 1/4 of the infections get detected in the game the game so the ratio deaths/detected infections will be 4% (the deaths/actual infections is 1%) - likely too optimistic in the scenario of overwhelmed testing capacity.
If you do nothing in the game, you kill 1% of the population during the first wave and you kill another ~0.5% in winter after the natural immunity of some people expires. Again, the real country was simply not willing to go that far.
Well, letting the thing burn is actually the fastest way to end the pandemic. The only thing faster than that would be additional intentional spreading (covid parties?) and/or vaccinations going on at the same time. This applies to any pandemic really, as long as the disease leaves some immunity. It's epidemiology 101, for example the SIR model flatlines when the R gets to the herd immunity level.
But do you want the other [than pandemic ending] consequences? Like in your game-based example, 10% of the population dead?
I played the game by restricting everything except a full lockdown and by doing nothing. The first time I had less than 200 deaths, the second time almost 150 k. The government survived in both cases, actually a little better in the latter. I'm not surprised because I don't remember a single government having to resign because of covid, even where the pandemic hit hard. Somebody had lost elections but it's difficult to assess the impact of covid mismanagement of the outcome of any election.
Well if you manged to kill 10% of the country then it is completely inaccurate. The maximum CSF I have seen estimated for coronavirus is 3% and I have a feeling that is quite an overestimation.
Yeah I killed 111k people immediately and then it flatlined, I was a little surprised. Then again, I killed 111k people.. my second time I did what I thought we (the US) should do with a full lockdown and killed like 50 total.
Wow, the author, Michal Beneš, was my colleague at the Mathematical-Physical Faculty. We were (well, I hope I can say are) on good terms. He later specialized in analysis, I in algebra.
A funny fellow with a knack for understanding society at large.
I got a little annoyed I couldn't just go hard initially and eradicate the virus like Aus/NZ do whenever theres an outbreak(NSW being a notable outlier but not quibbling). No Matter how strict I was initially, there were still at least 5 cases a day...
Why is there no option to have Contact Tracing & QR Codes? Even initially in the pandemic that's how Taiwan got on top of it. Why can't we do mass testing & localised lockdowns?
I know it's a game, but I feel like the USA/Europe don't even really consider the measures in place that have had the most impact on curbing the spread in places that went for elimination.
[game author here] Politically, eradication was never a real option in Czechia.
Improved contact tracing and testing is something we and the experts we worked with strongly supported. And we did
consider adding them to the game. At the end, these features ended on the "cutting floor". We felt these features would a) be complicating the game too much b) they would lead to an optimal strategy too far away from what the the real country was doing. Unfortunately, real Czechia didn't use summer and fall 2020 to implement these "smart measures". In winter 2020/2021 only crude restrictive measures were available to manage the incoming virus surge.
Australia hasn’t eradicated the virus though and has botched a vaccine rollout. The federal government has relied on border control measures which include threatening Australian citizens with jail time if they try to return to their country.
The game is modeled around mid-sized European nations. Westerners care so much about privacy and freedom that hard lockdowns and extensive contact tracing is politically impossible.
I once considered something like that for AIDS, based on the book "Sexual Ecology", by Rotello. A representation of the "gay fast lane", people with very high numbers of sexual partners per year (> 100) would have been included. You could try various strategies - closing bathhouses and bars, mandatory mass testing. Now that would have generated hate mail.
You can switch to English with the button on the top right.
Edit: It would be interesting that the site remember all the previous tries. I finally was able to avoid saturating the hospitals, but I don't remember how the other metrics compare with my previous tries.
Edit: Removed the link to the "version in English" because my link does not change the language.
It autoselects English which is correct for me. But then I figured out what it disregarded my preference and autoselected en-us mixed-endian date format *sigh*.
Long before the pandemic, I enjoyed playing Plague (mobile app game).
It's surprising accurate with its headlines — and was quite unnerving to live it irl.
And it's educational in the sense that the player must get just the right balance of transmission and symptoms before mutating ever-increasing lethality before becoming detected to 'win' the game (ie kill all humans).
I tried to do nothing and refuse all vaccinations etc... But it only killed 1/10 of the population. At least with Plague I could aim for total annihilation :)
The reason this simulation is so inaccurate relative to reality, is that it's assuming the only basis for individuals' decisions are government policies.
In the beginning everyone was searching for information, reading articles, and sharing experiences and listening to stories. It was the main topic of conversation for months. In places where the first wave hit hard, personal experiences were a much more credible source of information, and motivator of behaviour, than random edicts from officials.
And the reason "hard" government policies are so problematic is that they shift responsibility for both actions and consequences from individuals to some faceless authority. What does a restaurant owner think after six months of lost livelihood, when they finally catch it and it feels like a cold? That's more responsibility than any random government official can bear, and why voluntary measures first is so important.
Neat! The model does seem fairly aggressive though. There are some US states that have done little and their deaths are no where near as extreme as what the games suggests.
Super cool, congratulations! This was an excellent reminder of just how difficult and multi-faceted the decisions made during COVID were for legislators. Obviously neither extreme (close everything vs open everyhing) was ever going to be satisfied with any government's response, but I think this made me appreciate the impossibility of managing a pandemic even more.
There are many measures one can take missing and the actions one can take are too broad. Missing for example the measure of introducing tests for the population for usage of essential services. For example there could be separate options for various types of masks. There could be options for where to use masks. Then there could be measures for offices and so on. Some of the events seem time-scripted, to happen regardless of what you do, or I have been unlucky. Like I had all restrictions up, and something under 5k cases, bam! mutation pops up.
A real government has waaay more ways to fight the pandemic. For example tracing of cases can be done, if there are few enough cases. Strict controls on quaranteen for returners from other countries.
However, the game sends the message: "Could you have done better?" Perhaps not too wrong.
„Hammer and dance“ seems to be the best strategy in this game. Acceptance of population does not seem to be affected by doing so.
My worst try was 140k deaths, best 20k. The range seems quite extrem- can this be backed by real world data?
I got just 137 deaths and 1.8 trillion in debt first time playing. I allowed protests, opened some stuff later on, and I allowed holiday gatherings, but otherwise locked everything down. I did extra compensation and such when I could. https://koronahra.cz/results/60e67c7e683514001ad551ec
Next time, I did nothing. Didn't invest in any vaccination campaigns or anything. Over 145k dead (yay, Army called in to dig mass graves!) And still 439B in debt.
Government survived in both cases (it's fair to point out that a sufficiently violent overthrowing of the government will end up killing people, so you should avoid it). So the first situation seemed like a better option. Each Czech life saved cost $440k (US). Worth every penny.
Maybe I'm missing it, but I don't see anything in here about non-human transmission. We know cats, dogs, hamsters, guinea pigs, mink, and gorillas can all get it. Ok, if you have a gorilla in your attic you probably have worse problems than infection, but with this many mammalian species already confirmed, it seems implausible to me that mice, squirrels, raccoons, possums, coyotes, foxes, and other common urban mammals are not spreading it.
I doubt animal transmission is a significant driver. Most animals remain outdoors and socially distanced from humans. Exceptions of course include farm workers, zookeepers, etc. But they’re a tiny percent of the population.
So, like many of us, I did nothing, and let the virus burn itself out, which it managed to do by July 2020.
Approx 1% deaths. Which I think is acceptable, to allow 99% of the population to be able to return to a normal life so quickly.
However, I'm not sure I understand the impact of the hospitals being over capacity? Does the model factor in extra deaths of people who can't get treated for non-Covid problems?
1% doesn't mean much like that but let's say for the UK alone that would amount to 680k deaths. Does that still sound acceptable?
WWII death toll for the UK was 0.94% of the population.
Has anyone published studies on hospital capacity vs. mortality rate during covid? I tried to find that at the beginning but couldn't find anything.
I've always suspected claims that overcapacity hospitals drastically increasing the mortality rate are not supported by data. Obviously if more people have covid, more people will die from covid, but normalized to the number of people that had the disease.
It's interesting that the game contrasts Voluntary and Involuntary Participation in pandemic counter-measures. At the extremes, everything is either voluntary or involuntary, but in real life, people are making decisions all the time based on the conditions they see; enforcement of government orders is only one of those conditions.
It doesn't include time parameters, yet we have had curfews here as the virus spreads more after dark. It seems to make assumptions that are unproven, like reusing the same mask day after day (like the vast majority of the public do) makes some kind of improvement.
Seems like most people did nothing in the first wave - only to pat themselves on the back when the rates were low in the summer. You may have to wait till the winter in the simulation to see how well that strategy really works... funny how art imitates reality!
[+] [-] daeglin|4 years ago|reply
First, this URL https://covidgame.info/ loads the game in English by default. There was a plan to popularize the game outside of Czechia but, frankly, we missed the window when major news outlets were interested.
To address few points mentioned in the comments: the game was tuned to the specific situation in Czech Republic around end of 2020 / beginning 2021. The goal was to build basic quantitative intuition about the behavior of the epidemiological model (SEIR model) that the general public and decision makers were lacking. The game doesn't allow for zero covid strategy - because that was never realistically considered. Likewise, we after some considerations, we didn't include cheap interventions like extensive testing, contact tracing and better government communication. This doesn't mean that we didn't support such interventions. However, Czech government proved unwilling or incapable to implement such measures and in the short/medium term broad restrictions were the only "levers" the decision makers could pull.
There is an interview for a major Czech Internet server about some aspects of the game development: https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=cs&tl=en&u=https:/...
We were working together with some real experts in Covid modelling and the model was in my opinion quantitatively sound (though, as we repeatedly said, the model was not optimized for scientific accuracy). At the end the was played by some members of the parliament, party experts and even ministers. We know that the game helped to facilitate consensus between the government and opposition in a very fragile political situation. I believe that, at the end, the game saved hundreds or thousands lives by helping to implement some necessary restrictions sooner than they'd be implemented otherwise.
[+] [-] noduerme|4 years ago|reply
The beauty of the concept is its simplicity, as well. It's a bit like an IFR training panel, or early text-based video games. You can't see where the plane is or where it's going, you only see the instrument readouts after you adjust something. Since we have all been flying blind, this is a great experience to put in front of people, simply of what it's like to adjust and wait.
Five stars, sending it to all the devs I know, also as a way to make a very engaging sim on a complex topic for people with no prior art =D
[+] [-] FabHK|4 years ago|reply
Astral Codex Ten (the reincarnated Slate Star Codex) has an informative article on the effectiveness of lockdowns that references and employs this simulation:
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/lockdown-effectiveness...
ETA: The post contains a graph of the frontier of pareto-efficient outcomes against which you might want to measure yourself when playing.
See also this blogpost by one of the epidemiologists working on the game: https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https...
[+] [-] daeglin|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pmontra|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] daeglin|4 years ago|reply
Note on the "social stability score": the game population is by design very "permissive" people will generally not revolt even if you implement very harsh lockdowns of if many people die. This is because we primarily wanted to allow the player to explore the epidemiological model even for fairly extreme strategies (and public opinion is hard to model anyways). In addition, we expect that most player will play the game only once and we didn't want to frustrate too many new players by "game over" screens.
For context: here is how I see what was happening in Czechia. The spring 2020 was handled well and country avoided any significant surge in Covid cases. During summer 2020, people get used to the pandemic. New view got a significant traction: Covid is not that serious and the best course was to let it sweep through the population and gain natural herd immunity.
Since then, there was a constant tug of war between side wishing to relax the rules and the side wishing for stricter rules. Every time the disease started to decline, the "relax rules" side gained more traction and every time the hospitals were close to the capacity (or arguably above the capacity), the government implemented fairly strict measures (there was a strong consensus that everybody must be able to get healthcare).
This explains why the popular "zero covid" and "no intervention" strategies were never attempted. It is hard to tell how well our model works for these strategies. My guess is "not too poorly" but the we have much better confidence in the model in the regime much closer to real world behavior of the country.
[+] [-] pedrig|4 years ago|reply
Disclaimer: This is an unpolished toy project. It was built in a weekend by simple dude who likes to code but has no idea about virology and epidemiology.
[0]: https://patricsteiner.github.io/corona-simulator/
[+] [-] Robotbeat|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] daeglin|4 years ago|reply
I am guessing that the renewed interest in our game is coming from the recent post at Astral Codex Ten: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/lockdown-effectiveness... It is well worth reading that post.
Let me also link a post from one of our collaborators explaining how, for most countries, the dichotomy between saving lives and economy was somewhat false and relative to the real outcomes it was possible to improve both: https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https...
A lot of the discussion on this forum center around the question what was the optimal policy and how well the game simulated that policy. In particular, there is a lot of discussion around the two "extreme" approaches: "zero covid" and "no interventions". That is fine, we had these discussions many times and we can explain how these approaches are represented in the game (in my opinion, not too unrealistically) but, at the same time, it somewhat misses the point. The game was about building intuition about simple epidemiological SEIR model close to the regime where the real country was operating - and for political reasons it was very unlikely that the country will radically change the course.
Lot of the game design decisions were some compromise between different goals of the game. Let me give an example: the team of authors of the game strongly believes that expanding contract tracing would a good thing. We were considering adding it to the game. However, what would be a point of adding that option to the game? It would further clutter UI (we had mobile users on mind). It would not add anything to the game because the decision to expand tracing would have no significant downside. And last it would hardly add anything to the public debate, it would just communicate that the authors of the game like contact tracing. There were already zillion of well argued opinion pieces on the topic. In fact, failures of contact tracing were more about failures of the specific agency than any conscious decision on the decision maker side. In short, tacking this issue in the game would quickly move from mathematical modeling into much more murky waters of public service efficiency.
You should also keep in mind that the game was just a small piece in a bigger mosaic of truly incredible efforts of many other volunteers. E.g. "Interdisplinary group for epidemic situations" https://www.meses.cz/. The game was never intended to provide comprehensive picture or recommendations.
[+] [-] RVuRnvbM2e|4 years ago|reply
The game should model this because it is the only strategy that has been shown to be actually effective, and might make people realise how badly governments handled this.
[+] [-] voidfunc|4 years ago|reply
What is this supposed to be teaching exactly?
If the model is correct then I think a lot of people would say we should have just let the disease burn out and deal with the deaths. I'm not sure that's what the designers intended.
[+] [-] tapland|4 years ago|reply
I had a doctor outright scold me for wearing a mask to the hospital here (checkup for crohns disease which I take immunosupressants for) and didnt see a single other mask in the hospital until December 2020. o.O.
Smaller countries with limited access to the wider discussions in English can turn very weird.
[+] [-] nradov|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] parksy|4 years ago|reply
In Australia, it appears some early models predicted between 50k to 150k lives lost assuming no response. A statistical life is valued at over $4m, meaning a cost of $200bn to $600bn. Also, with 60% of the population infected, that would mean over 12 million people infected - we still don't have a good idea what the long-term issues will be - but one study in Australia found ~5% of people experiencing "long covid" symptoms, which would mean at least 600,000 people with long-term complications - which in our hypothetical Harkonnen society we'd likely just shove them into a hole somewhere and forget about them, otherwise we'd have to deal with their social welfare (yuck!) and strain on the health system.
No doubt the cost, responses, short and long term impacts, etc, will be something economists and sociologists will debate for decades to come.
https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/thousands-of-predict...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_of_life#Australia
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-06-24/long-covid-nsw-resear...
Edit: On thinking about it, I think the value of life is based on insurance / compensation purposes, perhaps the value of a life in terms of total GDP contribution would be different? Anyway, a subject more for the actuaries and economists I think. Interesting to consider nonetheless, which I think may be the overall point of this game.
[+] [-] jkey|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] daeglin|4 years ago|reply
Note that only 1/4 of the infections get detected in the game the game so the ratio deaths/detected infections will be 4% (the deaths/actual infections is 1%) - likely too optimistic in the scenario of overwhelmed testing capacity.
If you do nothing in the game, you kill 1% of the population during the first wave and you kill another ~0.5% in winter after the natural immunity of some people expires. Again, the real country was simply not willing to go that far.
[+] [-] H8crilA|4 years ago|reply
But do you want the other [than pandemic ending] consequences? Like in your game-based example, 10% of the population dead?
[+] [-] pmontra|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] collyw|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dng88|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] notananthem|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] inglor_cz|4 years ago|reply
A funny fellow with a knack for understanding society at large.
[+] [-] daeglin|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Andaith|4 years ago|reply
Why is there no option to have Contact Tracing & QR Codes? Even initially in the pandemic that's how Taiwan got on top of it. Why can't we do mass testing & localised lockdowns?
I know it's a game, but I feel like the USA/Europe don't even really consider the measures in place that have had the most impact on curbing the spread in places that went for elimination.
[+] [-] daeglin|4 years ago|reply
Improved contact tracing and testing is something we and the experts we worked with strongly supported. And we did consider adding them to the game. At the end, these features ended on the "cutting floor". We felt these features would a) be complicating the game too much b) they would lead to an optimal strategy too far away from what the the real country was doing. Unfortunately, real Czechia didn't use summer and fall 2020 to implement these "smart measures". In winter 2020/2021 only crude restrictive measures were available to manage the incoming virus surge.
[+] [-] emmelaich|4 years ago|reply
Well, we haven't eradicated it have we. Keeps popping up.
We'll only know if the lockdowns are worthwhile after few years of accounting.
[+] [-] jamil7|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jdavis703|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 908B64B197|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Animats|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gus_massa|4 years ago|reply
Edit: It would be interesting that the site remember all the previous tries. I finally was able to avoid saturating the hospitals, but I don't remember how the other metrics compare with my previous tries.
Edit: Removed the link to the "version in English" because my link does not change the language.
[+] [-] justshowpost|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mijkal|4 years ago|reply
It's surprising accurate with its headlines — and was quite unnerving to live it irl.
And it's educational in the sense that the player must get just the right balance of transmission and symptoms before mutating ever-increasing lethality before becoming detected to 'win' the game (ie kill all humans).
https://www.ndemiccreations.com/en/22-plague-inc
[+] [-] linkdd|4 years ago|reply
Now I have no remorse on playing on easy mode :)
I tried to do nothing and refuse all vaccinations etc... But it only killed 1/10 of the population. At least with Plague I could aim for total annihilation :)
[+] [-] johbjo|4 years ago|reply
In the beginning everyone was searching for information, reading articles, and sharing experiences and listening to stories. It was the main topic of conversation for months. In places where the first wave hit hard, personal experiences were a much more credible source of information, and motivator of behaviour, than random edicts from officials.
And the reason "hard" government policies are so problematic is that they shift responsibility for both actions and consequences from individuals to some faceless authority. What does a restaurant owner think after six months of lost livelihood, when they finally catch it and it feels like a cold? That's more responsibility than any random government official can bear, and why voluntary measures first is so important.
[+] [-] nayuki|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fny|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] uncomputation|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zelphirkalt|4 years ago|reply
A real government has waaay more ways to fight the pandemic. For example tracing of cases can be done, if there are few enough cases. Strict controls on quaranteen for returners from other countries.
However, the game sends the message: "Could you have done better?" Perhaps not too wrong.
[+] [-] HellDunkel|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Robotbeat|4 years ago|reply
Next time, I did nothing. Didn't invest in any vaccination campaigns or anything. Over 145k dead (yay, Army called in to dig mass graves!) And still 439B in debt.
https://koronahra.cz/results/60e67dfdfecc84001a33a410
Government survived in both cases (it's fair to point out that a sufficiently violent overthrowing of the government will end up killing people, so you should avoid it). So the first situation seemed like a better option. Each Czech life saved cost $440k (US). Worth every penny.
[+] [-] rossdavidh|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jdavis703|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mattowen_uk|4 years ago|reply
Approx 1% deaths. Which I think is acceptable, to allow 99% of the population to be able to return to a normal life so quickly.
However, I'm not sure I understand the impact of the hospitals being over capacity? Does the model factor in extra deaths of people who can't get treated for non-Covid problems?
[+] [-] e12e|4 years ago|reply
That's 100 million people dead, globally? And higher than UK deaths during WW2?
https://topforeignstocks.com/2016/04/19/chart-world-war-ii-c...
[+] [-] bigbaguette|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] spywaregorilla|4 years ago|reply
I've always suspected claims that overcapacity hospitals drastically increasing the mortality rate are not supported by data. Obviously if more people have covid, more people will die from covid, but normalized to the number of people that had the disease.
[+] [-] csours|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] collyw|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] reedf1|4 years ago|reply