As things progress, I wanted to understand how social distancing helps in reducing the spreading of the current virus.
Therefor I programmed a browser-based Javascript simulation, which is capable of showing you how at all a virus progresses to spread and how fast this happens — and how quarantine and social distancing are helping to slow down the progression and even save others (peoples with higher risk of death when being infected).
Feel free to play around with it and keep your social contacts to a minimum.
Following things are the basics
- each dot represents a person, initial position and direction of each person is determined randomly
- the color of the person represents the persons health state
- if ways cross, already infected people infect the ones that are crossing
- ways are considered as crossing, when the distance of two people is below the safe distance
- keeping a safe distance means, to change direction shortly before ways would cross
- isolated people are kept “in the background”
So the model behind the simulation is quite simple, yet realistic enough for bigger cities.
Densities for many cities can be found on wikipedia. Selected Densities are:
- Berlin = 4088 people per square-kilometer
- Hamburg = 2430 people per square-kilometer
- New York = 10639 people per square-kilometer
- Chicago = 4628 people per square-kilometer
- Wuhan = 5195 people per square-kilometer
As this is a simulation with a random part (e.g. position of people or probabilities involved), try running your settings multiple times. You will get different results.
Running the same simulation a very large number of times (also called Monte Carlo method) might even give some indicators, if your settings lead to stable conditions.