
Corona Simulator - mef
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/world/corona-simulator/
======
nyolfen
> “As Lawrence O. Gostin, a professor of global health law at Georgetown
> University, put it: “The truth is those kinds of lockdowns are very rare and
> never effective.””

uh, except... the one we all just watched be successfully implemented in
wuhan?

~~~
hn_throwaway_99
Except what was really implemented in Wuhan was really not just quarantine,
but was also an _extreme_ form of social distancing, where essentially the
whole province of Wuhan was locked down.

~~~
hawkice
*Hubei

------
robotresearcher
One thing about this sim bothers me. Having points bounce off each other means
they migrate more slowly and increases the effective contact graph diameter.
Bouncing points aren't meaningful for the system being modeled. Me staying at
home doesn't restrict your movements: our decisions are independent.

IMHO he should turn off the collision model. The effect will still be there,
but the logistic parameters will be different.

~~~
IgorPartola
Yeah this is good for cells in a blood stream, not humans. Also humans
interact with other humans unevenly: you see your family and coworkers more
often and for more time than a random barista. Except the barista where you
always get your coffee on your lunch break. And then you have social mavens
who interact with loads of people. If you work in an office with 15 other
people, your social circle is likely on the order of like 100-200 people. If
you do public speaking for a living, your social circle is in the thousands.
Would be better to simulate it that way.

------
azinman2
What I don’t get is that we keep hearing quarantine isn’t effective, yet it
seems to be in China and South Korea:
[https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-lockdowns-
work-s...](https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-lockdowns-work-
statistics-by-country-2020-3?amp)

~~~
darkerside
I think it's more of, quarantine isn't economically feasible. But then, things
that aren't feasible can often become feasible in different circumstances.

~~~
mantap
Economically it doesn't make much difference. You can either isolate people
now or later. The period of isolation will be roughly the same because you
have to wait for the virus to exhaust its pool of hosts (in a household).
Definitely _politically_ it makes a big difference.

~~~
darkerside
Now and later make a HUGE difference economically. Time value of money.
Business cash flow. Not to mention, if it turns out to be unnecessary later,
later becomes never.

~~~
azinman2
The scale of the problem will be so much larger because we aren’t doing a
quarantine. In an exponentially growing virus, one single day makes a large
difference.

------
raynguyen
The thing is, with these models. Everyone will eventually catch the virus and
either dies off or recovers. If this happens in real life, the consequences
are dire and catastrophic.

Social distancing and avoiding large groups will obviously save lives and we
flatten the curve to allow for treatment of individuals that will require
hospitalization. But once the novelty of social distancing wears off. Will the
number of cases where people get affected explode once again?

The question is when will this virus go away? (if ever). Will everybody catch
it eventually? Will the panic fade and Corona be just another (and much
deadlier) strain of the flu?

~~~
cl42
That’s actually not correct, and the point of the simulations is to show that.
By social distancing, you reduce the likelihood of everyone getting the
disease. The use of social distancing brings the probability that everyone
gets infected at some point closer to 0.0 but doesn’t make it 0.0. It’s
possible to have a result where you either have people who were never
infected, or ones who are fully recovered.

That’s what they’re driving at.

~~~
totalZero
The major error with the model used in the article is that, in real life, all
the points will eventually start to move again.

------
magoghm
Nice simulations. But I believe that using a population of only 200
individuals might be giving misleading results because it enters too fast the
logistic limit part of the curve before you can experience the early
exponential part. [https://www.dummies.com/education/science/environmental-
scie...](https://www.dummies.com/education/science/environmental-science/the-
environmental-science-of-population-growth-models/)

~~~
jgwil2
Yep. Would be nice if they let the user play around with the parameters. Might
not be feasible to animate thousands of objects in a browser though.

~~~
catacombs
Exactly. The most, at best, could be 1,000, but will that be enough? This
project was likely built on a tight deadline and getting it out quickly onto
multiple devices was the goal.

If someone has a better approach, I’d love to hear it.

------
hackandtrip
The comparison between social distancing and quarantine has 0 sense. In Italy,
we tried distancing, but without strict measures, people won't listen and the
virus kept spreading. You can't enforce something like that without police
action

~~~
rdtwo
We’re there in Seattle right now exact same failure mode

------
Rapzid
There seems to be a very well defined separation between those who have a
relatively high chance of becoming critically ill, and those who have a very
low chance. Depending on what you are optimizing for it could be more
important to keep those groups separated.

I wonder if having known that for weeks now has lead to better social
distancing between those groups, even if interactions within the low risk
group has stayed rather high. Could lead to a lot of spread with very little
detection because we largely only test for and catch the really bad cases.

------
joppy
My understanding of a lot of countries approaches is that they're not trying
to minimise the total number of people that have or will be infected, but
they're trying to minimise the maximum number of people infected at a time (to
ensure that healthcare is still available to everybody that needs it). In
these simulations, that would correspond to drawing some horizontal line
across the chart and trying to keep the orange under there the whole time.

I'm not sure if the long-term outlook is "we're all going to get it" like the
flu, or we're trying to stave as much of it off before a vaccine is widely
available.

~~~
shintakezou
> trying to minimise the maximum number of people infected at a time (to
> ensure that healthcare is still available to everybody that needs it).

It is so, at least in Italy. Basically they told us the reason of these
measure is to spread the cases over a larger time frame... but nobody has said
it's to reduce the number of cases.

------
pvinis
Can I just comment on the (IMO bad) choice of colors? It's hard to see the
difference of sick and recovered, especially in the big square.

Other than that, nice simulations. :)

~~~
maigret
Indeed, the contrast is low and probably not very accessible. Their design
system should consider that so it’s not up to some designer or developer to
decide case by case during crunch time.

------
yogafiremf
>"Recovered person can neither transmit simulitis to a healthy person nor
become sick again after coming in contact with a sick person."

The assumption is wrong. There are several cases of recovered patients getting
coronavirus again. This virus is similar to HIV.
[https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/asia/japan-woman-
covid-...](https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/asia/japan-woman-
covid-19-coronavirus-second-time-recovered-12474880)

~~~
jonshariat
From the reports I've seen, they have tested positive again which is different
than getting it again.

------
Leary
I think this pandemic will reveal many facets on the effectiveness of
quarantines/lock downs.

These measures always have a political meaning, because they effectively
create a separation between those included and those excluded from the
quarantine. Such a political move will pressure some politicians toward
implementing these lockdowns if they are targeted toward foreigners and away
from them if implemented toward a domestic subgroup.

It may be easy to ban travel from Europe, but very hard to ban travel from
Washington state.

------
glaive123
The people who don't understand this stuff, aren't failing to understand it
because no one wrote about it. It's because they are not white collar or
college graduates and are not likely to read The Washington Post in the first
place. My father is the perfect example of this. He's dyslexic and so he
struggles to read detailed journalism and gets all of his information from
cable TV news like Fox News.

~~~
maxerickson
There's really not a 1:1 relationship between "college" and "white collar",
and "curiosity".

Plenty of people with their fancy college degree are incurious, and plenty of
people that barely made it out of high school are curious.

It's an appealing shorthand, but it's not a great one.

~~~
glaive123
Obviously there's not a 1:1 relationship. And I never made such claim. I am
saying that the people who read detailed journalism tend to have a higher
reading level, e.g. they work in a job where reading and analysis is a daily
part of their work, this would be considered white collar.

Please don't put words in my mouth when I never said there was a 1:1
relationship.

------
lucb1e
Can't view due to cookiewall, is this an article _about_ a simulator somewhere
(that someone could link) or is the simulator their own?

~~~
catacombs
Why don’t you support the paper and buy a subscription?

~~~
lucb1e
Because it isn't nearly worth $90 to me, I barely ever read any of their
articles.

It's also not something I can look at before deciding whether I want to pay
for it, not like a product in a shop or something I can order and return
(unused) for 14 days. If paying 50 cents for this article was possible, I
would have no idea what I'm getting (beyond the title "Corona Simulator") or
whether it's worth it, though a one-time 50 cents charge would definitely be
more considerable than a recurring and more expensive subscription.

~~~
catacombs
Where do you get your news?

~~~
lucb1e
General news? Most things that actually impact my life, people (colleagues,
friends, family) will tell me about it; the rest mostly passes me by. Some
comes from HN, and when there is a big story I'll sometimes browse to nos.nl,
but that's about it.

Tech news I keep up with at Tweakers.net, where I have a subscription. Well,
and HN again of course, but a lot of that is personal blogs, show/ask HN
posts, and a minority of what I click is research/tech news which then breaks
down further into many different outlets.

I also use Reddit but the closest sub I have to news is r/globaltalk, so
that's mostly people talking about what's going on near them and not
journalists that need to be paid.

------
rdtwo
The problem we’re seeing is that too many people are moving. Seattle was maybe
25% slower Sunday than normal. That’s not enough, people aren’t respecting
social distancing or even the 250 gathering limits. Seattle pd is failing to
enforce as well.

------
yummypaint
This is a great intuitive set of models. It also suggests scenarios where a
poorly implemented quarantine could make things worse by intensifying contact
and increasing spread between those isolated together, and then releasing
everyone while still contagious. It drives home that if people are forcibly
kept in close quarters for quarantine, its essential to see the full time
period through. If resources might eventually wear thin enough that a
quarantine may not be sustainable, it's probably better not to do it at all.

~~~
jariel
I think it illustrates what happened on the 'cruise ship' (i.e. close
proximity, clustered) quarantines, but it doesn't very well explain what real,
individual quarantine would do.

~~~
iso1631
What was interesting on the cruise ships is how few got it. Of the 3,681
tested, only 696 had it - after a month of close quarters. That's under 20%.

Doesn't that suggest it doesn't spread particularly easily?

All in all, 1% of those that caught it died, and cruise ships skew towards
older people.

