simulation
155 posts
As vaccinations roll out, we work towards herd immunity, there are various challenges to consider along the way. Thomas Wilburn and Richard Harris, reporting for NPR, used simulations to imagine three scenarios: a more infectious variant of the coronavirus, high initial immunity, and low initial immunity. Since it’s a simulation it of course doesn’t consider every real-life detail of immunity and viral spread, but the animations and the hexagon grids...
With each model update, FiveThirtyEight runs 40,000 simulations, or what-ifs, to calculate the odds for who will win the election. Their new interactive lets you experiment with all of the what-ifs to see how the odds shift when a candidate wins a state. It answers the question, “If ______ wins in ______ and in ______, etc., what are the chances of him winning the whole thing?” So if Trump wins...
If someone sneezes in a closed space, you hope that the area has good ventilation, because those sneeze particles are going to spread. The New York Times explains in the context of a subway train. Wear a mask. Tags: coronavirus, mask, New York Times, simulation, subway
Herd immunity works when you have enough people who are immune to a disease, maybe because they already got it or there’s a vaccine, so that the disease can’t spread anymore to those who don’t have a resistance. For The Washington Post, Harry Stevens is back with simulitis to demonstrate how this works in greater detail. It starts at the individual level, generalizes to a larger group, and then zooms...
The timelines keep shifting and people are getting antsy for many valid (and not-so-valid) reasons. When will this end? Will we ever get “normal” again? At this point, simulations are probably the closest we can get to seeing what might happen next. Marcel Salathé and Nicky Case peer into what happens next with these playable simulations. Where many simulations have felt like distant, abstract ideas, Salathé and Case’s explanations and...
Using 3-D simulation data from the Kyoto Institute of Technology, The New York Times shows how droplets from a sneeze or a cough can spread in a space. In a nutshell, six feet is the recommendation while in public areas, but the farther you away you can stay away the better. Go to the end, and there’s also an augmented reality segment that puts a six-foot range around you. I...
3Blue1Brown goes into more of the math of SIR models — which drive many of the simulations you’ve seen so far — that assume people are susceptible, infectious, or recovered. Tags: 3Blue1Brown, coronavirus, epidemic, simulation
We don't know what's going to happen in the future, but we can look at what we do know and make our best guess. Read More
Using R, we look at how your decreased interaction with others can help slow the spread of infectious diseases. Read More
Social distancing is the game plan these days. Try to stay at home and avoid contact with others as much as you can. But why? For The Washington Post, Harry Stevens used simplified simulations of an imaginary virus to show how social distancing can flatten the curve. Tags: coronavirus, Harry Stevens, simulation, social distancing, Washington Post