
Simulating a global Ebola outbreak - doomrobo
http://community.wolfram.com/groups/-/m/t/326240
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steven777400
Not very useful because it doesn't take into consideration the most
significant causes (or restrictions) of spread of Ebola or similar diseases,
which relates to cultural interpersonal interactions (such as handling and
washing the dead), education, and poverty levels.

Take a dozen Ebola infected persons and drop them in New York. The infection
will be eliminated in a few transmissions. Take a dozen Ebola infected persons
and drop them in the poorest quarter of Monrovia in Liberia, and well... we're
watching what happens.

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doomrobo
That's a good point and the author kind of anticipates this with an umbrella
"this isn't legit" clause at the end. Though I must say just as a
demonstration of (albeit simple) predictive disease modeling in Mathematica,
this article still stands on its own.

It would be interesting to see how organizations like the CDC characterize and
formalize all the variables that this article is forced to ignore for
simplicity's sake. Are there maps of health care quality in use? Are there
other important factors related to transmission other than infectiousness and
population density of a given area? etc

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Anon84
Or you can do it properly with an actual (and well tested) epidemic simulator
with zero lines of code:
[http://www.gleamviz.org/simulator/](http://www.gleamviz.org/simulator/)

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jacques_chester
Epidemic simulations, or contagion simulations, turn out to have pretty wide
applications. For example, you can adapt a lot of the basic agent-in-a-grid
logic many simulators use to model bushfires[1].

Similarly, if you take the S/I/R model and modify the states and infection
functions to model the spread of ideas in a social network. Eg instead of an
infection function based purely on proximity, you might also adjust for
similarity (homophily) between two agents.

If you want to see a much less sophisticated epidemic model, performed on a
simple grid, I wrote a crappy one as a student[2].

[1] [http://www.bushfirecrc.com/projects/a51/computer-
simulation-...](http://www.bushfirecrc.com/projects/a51/computer-simulation-
modelling) [2] [https://github.com/jchester/ruby-epidemic-
model](https://github.com/jchester/ruby-epidemic-model)

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contingencies
Meanwhile, in perhaps scarier reality...
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_West_Africa_Ebola_virus_o...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_West_Africa_Ebola_virus_outbreak#Timeline_of_the_outbreak)

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Goopplesoft
Its really impressive what you can do in very few lines of code within the
wolfram ecosystem.

~~~
knz42
Except that to make a few diagram at the end required a lot of Wolfram code,
although the model was very simplistic.

To me (working with complex models for work) I fear that complexity with
Wolfram would shoot up to unmanageable levels once you start doing serious
work.

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withinthreshold
It's false, Madagascar will be safe.

