Keep your distance!

I haven't written anything on this blog for ... quite a while.

I'm coming back to it to share a model that may help you visualize the effect of social distancing. Instructions on making it work are below.

When you run the model, you can observe how quickly the virus spreads, how many people in total get infected, and how many people die.

What your screen might look like after 54 days of the model

When you change the degree of social distancing, you can observe changes in all of those factors.

The model is a modification of a pre-existing model of virus transmission. In that model, a small number of people start off infected. People move around randomly, and any time an infected person shares a space with a susceptible person, there's a chance that infection will occur. After a certain amount of time, the disease runs its course: the person either recovers and has acquired immunity, or they die.

The modification I made was to allow the user to change the speed with which people move around the world. Of course this is far from being a perfect representation of social distancing, but it does capture one essential element of that practice: reducing the speed of people's movement in the model reduces the frequency with which people make new contacts.

The default speed of movement is 1. The user can choose any value between 0 and 1, in increments of 0.1. If you choose a lower value, you're choosing a more thoroughgoing implementation of social distancing.

If you scroll down on your screen, you'll see tabs you can open up for the "Command Center", for "NetLogo Code", and for "Model Info". The first two of those aren't much use to you unless you know NetLogo, but if you click on "Model Info" you'll get a bunch of information about how to use the model.

Click on "Model Info" to learn much more

Some results from the fancier laptop version of the model are in the follow-up post.

Getting and using the model
Click or right-click the link below to download the file to a convenient place on your computer. When you open the file, it should automatically open the web page for NetLogo Web and allow you to run the program.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1KtoYSCMvExdN_xaNBBM1tiWuZhF6SD3O/view?usp=sharing