> “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.””<p>uh, except... the one we all just watched be successfully implemented in wuhan?
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.<p>IMHO he should turn off the collision model. The effect will still be there, but the logistic parameters will be different.
What I don’t get is that we keep hearing quarantine isn’t effective, yet it seems to be in China and South Korea: <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-lockdowns-work-statistics-by-country-2020-3?amp" rel="nofollow">https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-lockdowns-work-s...</a>
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.<p>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?<p>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?
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.
<a href="https://www.dummies.com/education/science/environmental-science/the-environmental-science-of-population-growth-models/" rel="nofollow">https://www.dummies.com/education/science/environmental-scie...</a>
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
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.<p>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.
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.<p>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.
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.<p>Other than that, nice simulations. :)
>"Recovered person can neither transmit simulitis to a healthy person nor become sick again after coming in contact with a sick person."<p>The assumption is wrong. There are several cases of recovered patients getting coronavirus again. This virus is similar to HIV.
<a href="https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/asia/japan-woman-covid-19-coronavirus-second-time-recovered-12474880" rel="nofollow">https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/asia/japan-woman-covid-...</a>
I think this pandemic will reveal many facets on the effectiveness of quarantines/lock downs.<p>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.<p>It may be easy to ban travel from Europe, but very hard to ban travel from Washington state.
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.
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.
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.