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Corona Game: A simulation of how Covid-19 spreads

• gus_massa 5y ago
  You can switch to English with the button on the top right. Edit: It would be interesting that the site remember all the previous tries. I finally was able to avoid saturating the hospitals, but I don't remember how the other metrics compare with my previous tries. Edit: Removed the link to the "version in English" because my link does not change the language.
  • justshowpost 5y ago
    It autoselects English which is correct for me. But then I figured out what it disregarded my preference and autoselected en-us mixed-endian date format *sigh*.
    • gus_massa 5y ago
      I have something like "es-ar, es, en, en-us". Probably if the first one is not English or a version of it, the site default to Czech.
      • justshowpost 5y ago
        That explains the [mis]behaviour, few software look that deep.
• inglor_cz 5y ago
  Wow, the author, Michal Beneš, was my colleague at the Mathematical-Physical Faculty. We were (well, I hope I can say are) on good terms. He later specialized in analysis, I in algebra. A funny fellow with a knack for understanding society at large.
  • daeglin 5y ago
    Hi :) Nice to meet you here. I do appreciate your work on free speech issues! Michal
• lizhang 5y ago
  This feels more like a slideshow than a game - every step in time had another popup that paused the game.
• soperj 5y ago
  Unfortunate that it doesn't allow you to get back to zero. Various countries have managed to do it, including China with hard lock downs.
  • kube-system 5y ago
    China is not at zero even today. Literally today they imposed a lockdown in Ruili due to an outbreak.
    • shalmanese 5y ago
      a) it was yesterday. b) getting back to zero does not mean staying at zero. China has had long stretches of time with zero reported cases of local transmission, punctuated by brief outbreaks like the current one.
      • Izkata 5y ago
        On the Worldometers chart, China has never had any stretch with 0 cases (I'm mousing over the Total Cases graph and it never noticeably stays the same number; there may be a handful of single days mixed in there that aren't obvious like this). It's their deaths that stopped increasing - only 4 new deaths in over a year.
        • DiogenesKynikos 5y ago
          Worldometers is including travelers who get infected outside of China, but who are diagnosed as having SARS-CoV-2 while undergoing the mandatory quarantine to enter China. That's different from people who get infected in China. There have been long stretches of time with zero local cases in China. Just to illustrate the difference, here's a typical daily report from China's main public health authority:[1] > BEIJING, June 28 (Xinhua) -- The Chinese mainland on Sunday reported 21 imported COVID-19 cases but no new locally transmitted cases, the National Health Commission said in its daily report on Monday. The "imported cases" are among travelers undergoing quarantine. There have been a few outbreaks with local transmission, but so far, all of them have been successfully contained before they spread very far. Right now, for example, there's an outbreak in a town on the border with Myanmar. The town itself has been locked down and everyone in it (270k people) has undergone PCR testing, and will be tested a second time over the coming days. So far, about two dozen infected people have been identified. However, outside of this town, there are currently zero local cases in China. 1. http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2021-06/28/c_1310031605.htm http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2021-06/28/c_1310031605.htm
• helge9210 5y ago
  Nice simulator. Did nothing. Costs within a budget. Zero days of school lost. Only 150k dead for 15M infections (~1%).
  • SonicScrub 5y ago
    150k dead in the entirety of the small nation of Czechia. Yikes, that's a lot. I would not use the modifier "only" to describe that death toll. That's 1.4% of the nation's population. For context, that's about 43% of the total WW2 deaths of that nation done in a fraction of the time. I hope the "costs within budget" was worth that.
    • rsj_hn 5y ago
      Please cite a source for 150K, as that's pretty outlandish. Official government data is 30,311 dead here: https://onemocneni-aktualne.mzcr.cz/covid-19 https://onemocneni-aktualne.mzcr.cz/covid-19 The czech republic, in general, has below average respiratory outcomes due to higher than average levels of smoking and historically high levels of air pollution under communism (they burned brown coal), as well as an older population (1% of the population experiences acute respiratory infections each year). But all of these factors are improving, with cleaner air, declining smoking rates, etc.
      • pedrosorio 5y ago
        > Please cite a source for 150K Read the parent of the comment you responded to.
      • SonicScrub 5y ago
        I think you're very confused on the context of my comment. The link that this thread goes to is a simulator that mimics controlling COVID spread in the Czech Republic based on player-controlled government initiatives. I'm replying to someone who said they got 150k deaths in the game. My comment has nothing to do with real world COVID numbers in the Czech Republic.
      • gus_massa 5y ago
• spywaregorilla 5y ago
  Has anyone published studies on hospital capacity vs. mortality rate during covid? I tried to find that at the beginning but couldn't find anything. I've always suspected claims that overcapacity hospitals drastically increasing the mortality rate are not supported by data. Obviously if more people have covid, more people will die from covid, but normalized to the number of people that had the disease.
  • desine 5y ago
    There is one study I know of that found a "weak positive correlation" between number of ICU beds and mortality, no correlation between number of general beds and mortality: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7685049/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7685049/ There was a lot of misinformation and confusing data at the start of the pandemic regarding hospital beds. Here in the US, hospitals tend to operate near capacity as SOP - a result of for profit healthcare seeking max profitability. Most hospitals here also started reserving a percentage of their beds, both ICU and general care, for covid patients. These reserved but sometimes unoccupied beds were not factored in when local hospitals reported being at capacity - so a local radio station might say "these local hospitals are at max capacity" without reporting that they still have 5% beds free specifically for covid patients. I suspect this may have caused some deaths by people not seeking care because they thought it wasn't available when it was, however I haven't seen anything to validate that hypothesis (and I doubt there will ever be any data). One interesting sidenote is that the military hospitals that President Trump rolled out while he was still in charge had very little effect: https://www.npr.org/2020/05/07/851712311/u-s-field-hospitals-stand-down-most-without-treating-any-covid-19-patients https://www.npr.org/2020/05/07/851712311/u-s-field-hospitals...
    • spywaregorilla 5y ago
      I think this is part of it. Most locations did not actually experience hospital demand above capacity for long, if at all. Probably in large part due to the effectiveness of lockdowns.
  • pacbard 5y ago
• spywaregorilla 5y ago
  I enjoyed this a lot. One decent strat to explore was just turning on extra comp and nothing else. Social stability tended to stay at the max. 141k people died. Knowing how strong this is, you can just buy your way out of almost any upset with other choices for a relatively marginal increase in costs. A couple things I didn't understand: * My immune numbers started to go down at some point. Why? * How many people are there? The game suggests 10 million, but near the end it suggested there could have been 14 million people infected. I wonder if this game just uses an exponential model under its hood rather than something logarithmic. * Can the vaccine pr ever work out favorably? Seems like it doesn't.
  • pedrosorio 5y ago
    > My immune numbers started to go down at some point. Why? The methodology page [0] explains resistant people eventually become susceptible to infection again. > but near the end it suggested there could have been 14 million people infected Since the game is tracking total number of infections, rather than people infected, and since infected people can become susceptible again, that would explain the #infections > total population. [0] https://koronahra.cz/about https://koronahra.cz/about
    • nradov 5y ago
      That methodology doesn't appear to be supported by the latest scientific research. The vast majority of recovered patients retain a high level of immunity for an extended period of time. Reinfections have occurred but statistically are very rare.
• csours 5y ago
  It's interesting that the game contrasts Voluntary and Involuntary Participation in pandemic counter-measures. At the extremes, everything is either voluntary or involuntary, but in real life, people are making decisions all the time based on the conditions they see; enforcement of government orders is only one of those conditions.
  • csours 5y ago
    If I had a wish for the game, it would be to better show the lag between 3 things - Actual Infections, Test Positivity Rates, and Mortality. In the US, there is now evidence that community spread was occuring much earlier than initially thought - we didn't know about infections because test were unavailable. Also, you will only ever learn about infections after people get tested. Hospitalizations trail infection by 1-3 weeks, and death is 1-3 weeks after that. The decisions you made 2 months ago show up in mortality 'now' Add to that, the number of times where authorities went back and fixed the numbers. For a long time, there were not concrete numbers; in many cases the number of fatalities may never be known or agreed upon.
    • gus_massa 5y ago
      I think the idea is that you should take decision with incomplete data. Perhaps it would be interesting to show in the closing screen all the additional information.
• Animats 5y ago
  I once considered something like that for AIDS, based on the book "Sexual Ecology", by Rotello. A representation of the "gay fast lane", people with very high numbers of sexual partners per year (> 100) would have been included. You could try various strategies - closing bathhouses and bars, mandatory mass testing. Now that would have generated hate mail.
• lucb1e 5y ago
  Can you somehow turn off these constant pop-ups? Literally every two seconds a new message pops up about how I'm doing, how many people died in one day (I can see that alright), that it's summer (you don't say), that the social stability is dropping (that's the number I was looking at, thanks), if maybe I want to restart... I spend more time clicking OK yes next next finish than playing the game.
  • alecst 5y ago
    Man, chill the harsh, it's just a game...
    • lucb1e 5y ago
      hence I'd like to play it :) If there is a settings panel that I'm missing, that would be great. Though I also noticed it's a lot better at lower speeds (since the actions are visible with 2 weeks delay I had it on fast-forward at first, more arcade style for a first run than weigh-and-deliberate style)
  • dang 5y ago
    "Please don't complain about website formatting, back-button breakage, and similar annoyances. They're too common to be interesting. Exception: when the author is present. Then friendly feedback might be helpful." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• BjoernKW 5y ago
  It's beyond me why potential alternatives to lockdowns and restrictions in general are hardly ever discussed. I understand that games like this one have to be based on actually available data and models. Still, testing and efficient track & trace schemes could be (have been) a huge factor in preventing COVID-19 spread. For example, if everyone took a rapid antigene test twice a day, we'd be able to track new infections very quickly and before those can spread any further. If implemented properly, with such a scheme we perhaps could even do without any additional measures (other than vaccination, that is), incur merely a fraction of the current costs, and still keep the numbers of deaths and severe cases much lower than they are with the blunt instrument that is blanket lockdowns.
  • ianlevesque 5y ago
    You think the people refusing to get vaccinated are going to take a rapid antigen test?
    • BjoernKW 5y ago
      Well, those people perhaps aren't happily complying with lockdown measures either. It's a matter of how such a scheme would be implemented. One could imagine working with incentives, for example. Alternatively, being able to produce a valid, up-to-date test result at any time could be made mandatory. This might seem draconian but it's a lot less so than unending lockdowns and the perspective of continued social distancing.
      • helge9210 5y ago
        That looks like false dichotomy. You can lift lockdowns and not have forced medical procedures at the same time.
        • BjoernKW 5y ago
          Of course you can but there will be trade-offs. Those procedures (tests, vaccinations) can be entirely voluntary (as they are right now). However, then you could be facing a situation where not enough people get vaccinated or tested for curbing the spread of the virus. Societies will have to decide if they’re fine with the consequences that entails. Personally, I think that lockdowns and any other mandatory measures should be lifted once everyone’s vaccinated who wants to be vaccinated. Others - and societies as a whole - might disagree, though, which from my point of view would be a major problem, especially if continued lockdowns then are still considered the only viable alternative.
• HellDunkel 5y ago
  „Hammer and dance“ seems to be the best strategy in this game. Acceptance of population does not seem to be affected by doing so. My worst try was 140k deaths, best 20k. The range seems quite extrem- can this be backed by real world data?
  • shadilay 5y ago
    I did absolutely nothing and only had 108k deaths.
  • rantwasp 5y ago
    best try was 70 deaths with the government being overthrown in Jan 2021
    • rantwasp 5y ago
      it's interesting if you think about it. as a government are you successful when you minimize the number of deaths or when you minimize the debt you incur?
    • ryandrake 5y ago
      Before 2020, I would never have though "government being overthrown" was a realistic potential outcome of implementing sensible public health policy during a deadly worldwide pandemic, but here we are. EDIT: Just tried the game: The more you do to help people, and the more lives you save, the angrier they get. The people are the happiest if you let 10% of them die. It doesn't make any sense, but then again, the last 18 months have not made a lot of sense either.
      • mmastrac 5y ago
        It's like a Tontine. The losers aren't around to be unhappy, and those that didn't lose are happy because they suffered far less. To some degree killing 10% is the optimal strategy but only for emotionless androids. Are people getting unhappy because their relatives died though?
      • Toutouxc 5y ago
• shusaku 5y ago
  Neat game. A couple critiques: 1) no warm weather bonus in the second year? 2) maybe it would be fun to play with a fixed budget. As things stand it’s a little hard to make the trade off between money and lives
• dng88 5y ago
  One of the major issue, except the continuation of virus gaining function experiment, is the overburden of the health system. Hence the 10% death van cascade into … then mutation etc. Stop the source. Q. Immu. And watch your health system.
• SavantIdiot 5y ago
  Not really sure I understand this. If you play it long enough you bankrupt your country and the virus always wins. Is that the secret message, or do I just not know how to play?
  • DiogenesKynikos 5y ago
    The way the model is set up, a zero-CoVID strategy is impossible. If you close the borders and impose a full lockdown on day 1, you still end up getting about 10 cases/day forever (I believe this is due to assumptions about imported cases). There are, however, countries that have achieved zero CoVID and then reopened and sustained zero CoVID. But this is only possible with strict border quarantine rules, extensive contact tracing and immediate mass testing whenever a new case shows up.
    • lmm 5y ago
      > There are, however, countries that have achieved zero CoVID and then reopened and sustained zero CoVID. Is that actually true? The big success stories like Taiwan and Australia seem to keep getting imported cases and needing to lock down again.
      • Robotbeat 5y ago
        New Zealand did it.
        • DiogenesKynikos 5y ago
          As did China.
    • pbhjpbhj 5y ago
      The assumption should also be existing cases of infection that are not yet symptomatic, or are totally asymptomatic. Borders are leaky too, but when the disease was found it was already well distributed, and with a long incubation period.
  • 5y ago
• mijkal 5y ago
  Long before the pandemic, I enjoyed playing Plague (mobile app game). It's surprising accurate with its headlines — and was quite unnerving to live it irl. And it's educational in the sense that the player must get just the right balance of transmission and symptoms before mutating ever-increasing lethality before becoming detected to 'win' the game (ie kill all humans). https://www.ndemiccreations.com/en/22-plague-inc https://www.ndemiccreations.com/en/22-plague-inc
  • linkdd 5y ago
    I loved playing Plague Inc (the PC version). Now I have no remorse on playing on easy mode :) I tried to do nothing and refuse all vaccinations etc... But it only killed 1/10 of the population. At least with Plague I could aim for total annihilation :)
• nayuki 5y ago
  Previous thread of this same game from 3 hours earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27761279 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27761279
• rossdavidh 5y ago
  Maybe I'm missing it, but I don't see anything in here about non-human transmission. We know cats, dogs, hamsters, guinea pigs, mink, and gorillas can all get it. Ok, if you have a gorilla in your attic you probably have worse problems than infection, but with this many mammalian species already confirmed, it seems implausible to me that mice, squirrels, raccoons, possums, coyotes, foxes, and other common urban mammals are not spreading it.
  • xyzzy_plugh 5y ago
    Don't confuse common coronavirus in animals with Covid-19. My cats both have coronavirus, as many cats do, and will test positive for the test of their life. They don't, however, have Covid-19. They likely acquired it as shelter kittens many years ago.
    • heartbreak 5y ago
      Heads up, domestic cats can get sars-cov-2 as well: https://www.avma.org/resources-tools/animal-health-and-welfare/covid-19/sars-cov-2-animals-including-pets https://www.avma.org/resources-tools/animal-health-and-welfa...
  • jdavis703 5y ago
    I doubt animal transmission is a significant driver. Most animals remain outdoors and socially distanced from humans. Exceptions of course include farm workers, zookeepers, etc. But they’re a tiny percent of the population.
    • rossdavidh 5y ago
      The raccoon, or mouse, in your sick neighbor's attic last night, who goes into your attic tonight... The mink are the only ones we _know_ transmitted it. But I don't think we've looked much. Dogs, for one, do _not_ do social distancing. Plus, since we learned it aerosolizes more than was initially thought, the animal that walked through your airspace 15 minutes before can share lungspace with you. They don't have to get that close to you, especially at night when the windspeed is low.
• Andaith 5y ago
  I got a little annoyed I couldn't just go hard initially and eradicate the virus like Aus/NZ do whenever theres an outbreak(NSW being a notable outlier but not quibbling). No Matter how strict I was initially, there were still at least 5 cases a day... Why is there no option to have Contact Tracing & QR Codes? Even initially in the pandemic that's how Taiwan got on top of it. Why can't we do mass testing & localised lockdowns? I know it's a game, but I feel like the USA/Europe don't even really consider the measures in place that have had the most impact on curbing the spread in places that went for elimination.
  • jdavis703 5y ago
    The game is modeled around mid-sized European nations. Westerners care so much about privacy and freedom that hard lockdowns and extensive contact tracing is politically impossible.
    • idonotknowwhy 5y ago
      Australians and New Zealanders are westerners too
      • H8crilA 5y ago
        Everything seems to be "west" if you go far enough and allow for sufficient north/south drift.
      • moooooooaway 5y ago
        NZ is not a great example of an average Western country, with regards to a pandemic. For one thing, it is a small and remote island. For another thing, it supplies most of the world's sterile bovine serums because the country has never had a case of mad cow disease. Laugh all you want, but that's a lucrative market and they are very good at border controls.
        • zinckiwi 5y ago
          Almost exactly the same size as the island of Great Britain, and while distanced somewhat as the crow flies, precisely one (1) plane fight away from many places.
• voidfunc 5y ago
  I'm not sure how to feel about this simulation... I basically did nothing and burned through COVID within 3 months and things went back to normal by mid-summer. By the end of the year, despite mid-summer government confidence being terrible, I was told "The people trust the government" with a 70% approval. I mean I killed what 10% of the country, but hey... the people have short memories! What is this supposed to be teaching exactly? If the model is correct then I think a lot of people would say we should have just let the disease burn out and deal with the deaths. I'm not sure that's what the designers intended.
  • dng88 5y ago
    Stop the virus from the source. Lab … q wuhan and stop those index case flying out of wuhan … vaccination until 70-80%. For the 10% dead … how about mutation … if they did it is not going to be heed imm. It would be another 10%? It may stabilise or it may not.
  • notananthem 5y ago
    Yeah I killed 111k people immediately and then it flatlined, I was a little surprised. Then again, I killed 111k people.. my second time I did what I thought we (the US) should do with a full lockdown and killed like 50 total.
    • setr 5y ago
      Depends when you do it. Obviously if you go full Madagascar at the first sign of trouble, you’ll crush it, but it’d pretty absurd behavior (every false flag would trigger lockdown). I waited a little by accident and then went full lockdown and got a total of 130k deaths
  • H8crilA 5y ago
    Well, letting the thing burn is actually the fastest way to end the pandemic. The only thing faster than that would be additional intentional spreading (covid parties?) and/or vaccinations going on at the same time. This applies to any pandemic really, as long as the disease leaves some immunity. It's epidemiology 101, for example the SIR model flatlines when the R gets to the herd immunity level. But do you want the other [than pandemic ending] consequences? Like in your game-based example, 10% of the population dead?
• daeglin 5y ago
  Hi, game author here. First, this URL https://covidgame.info/ https://covidgame.info/ loads the game in English by default. There was a plan to popularize the game outside of Czechia but, frankly, we missed the window when major news outlets were interested. To address few points mentioned in the comments: the game was tuned to the specific situation in Czech Republic around end of 2020 / beginning 2021. The goal was to build basic quantitative intuition about the behavior of the epidemiological model (SEIR model) that the general public and decision makers were lacking. The game doesn't allow for zero covid strategy - because that was never realistically considered. Likewise, we after some considerations, we didn't include cheap interventions like extensive testing, contact tracing and better government communication. This doesn't mean that we didn't support such interventions. However, Czech government proved unwilling or incapable to implement such measures and in the short/medium term broad restrictions were the only "levers" the decision makers could pull. There is an interview for a major Czech Internet server about some aspects of the game development: https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=cs&tl=en&u=https://www.seznamzpravy.cz/clanek/naucna-hra-o-pandemii-vznikla-z-frustrace-z-urovne-koronavirove-diskuse-138814 https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=cs&tl=en&u=https:/... We were working together with some real experts in Covid modelling and the model was in my opinion quantitatively sound (though, as we repeatedly said, the model was not optimized for scientific accuracy). At the end the was played by some members of the parliament, party experts and even ministers. We know that the game helped to facilitate consensus between the government and opposition in a very fragile political situation. I believe that, at the end, the game saved hundreds or thousands lives by helping to implement some necessary restrictions sooner than they'd be implemented otherwise.
  • daeglin 5y ago
    BTW, source code is available here: https://github.com/swehq/corona-game https://github.com/swehq/corona-game
    • uzakov 5y ago
      This is honestly great! Could you please add a license? I would love to translate this and deploy in other languages.
• jb775 5y ago
  Does this simulation include hospitals being incentivized to label as many "Covid Related" deaths as possible, placebo mask wearing, corrupt one-sided media reporting, or changing the covid test cycle-count immediately after a vaccine was released?
• justshowpost 5y ago
  OK, finished it despite of high CPU and all the interruptions. Didn't like what it is impossible to simulate no actions at all – one of dialog wants either 10 Populism or 500 Monies, also there is implicit vaccination going unapproved by El Governmente. I'd play it again in Tropico.
• epgui 5y ago
  Biochemist here. Interesting concept, but extremely misleading. This game has an unrealistic rate of decay when measures are taken. You can take every possible action (full lockdown, throw all the money at the problem) to the max from day 1, and you'll spend the whole game at 10 new cases per day, even after the vaccine rollout. That's just not how things play out.
  • doubleunplussed 5y ago
    The author said they excluded the "COVID-zero" strategy, because Czech leadership did not consider it an option. See their comment at the top of this thread.
    • epgui 5y ago
      If you do what the buttons in the game say you're doing, you're going to get to zero after just a few weeks. That much is not a political question so much as it's a natural science question. As for the political aspect of the question, ie.: "what options are available to us"... I regret to be so blunt but in almost every case, when you hear people say that we can't afford eradication and that the best we can do is mitigate, that right there is what I would call serious political bullshit. It's what politicians say when they don't want to make difficult unpopular decisions. Eradication is almost always* the cheaper option. * (exceptions may apply)
  • jkey 5y ago
    [one of the coauthors of the game here] On the contrary, the game is realistic in this aspect. Czechia was basically never able to close the borders so tightly you would prevent "all imports". What "closed borders" meant in practice were tens of thousands people crossing the border every day. With prevalence in the rest of the Europe often much higher than 1 in 10k, this means you always have a stream of imports. Note that some of the borders look like this: https://polar.cz/data/gallery/modules/polar/news/articles/videos/20200630115000_865/715x402.jpg?ver=20200630115002 https://polar.cz/data/gallery/modules/polar/news/articles/vi... you have a town on both sides, and in normal times, due to Schengen, people are used to work and shop cross-border. ?In such contexts you can prevent most of cross-border travel, but not all of it.
• uncomputation 5y ago
  Super cool, congratulations! This was an excellent reminder of just how difficult and multi-faceted the decisions made during COVID were for legislators. Obviously neither extreme (close everything vs open everyhing) was ever going to be satisfied with any government's response, but I think this made me appreciate the impossibility of managing a pandemic even more.
• fny 5y ago
  Neat! The model does seem fairly aggressive though. There are some US states that have done little and their deaths are no where near as extreme as what the games suggests.
• estranhosidade 5y ago
  Somewhat morbid, but still interesting.
• lamontcg 5y ago
  Here's another corona policy simulator from last year: https://ncase.me/covid-19/ https://ncase.me/covid-19/
• Robotbeat 5y ago
  I got just 137 deaths and 1.8 trillion in debt first time playing. I allowed protests, opened some stuff later on, and I allowed holiday gatherings, but otherwise locked everything down. I did extra compensation and such when I could. https://koronahra.cz/results/60e67c7e683514001ad551ec https://koronahra.cz/results/60e67c7e683514001ad551ec Next time, I did nothing. Didn't invest in any vaccination campaigns or anything. Over 145k dead (yay, Army called in to dig mass graves!) And still 439B in debt. https://koronahra.cz/results/60e67dfdfecc84001a33a410 https://koronahra.cz/results/60e67dfdfecc84001a33a410 Government survived in both cases (it's fair to point out that a sufficiently violent overthrowing of the government will end up killing people, so you should avoid it). So the first situation seemed like a better option. Each Czech life saved cost $440k (US). Worth every penny.
• vmception 5y ago
  This or a refined version should be basically mandatory for policy makers
  • Closi 5y ago
    That already exists, although not quite as interactive. At least in the uk, there are agent-based models which have been used for policy (although it’s impossible to tell if they were effective in driving policy decisions in practice - the UK media would say no, although it’s a little bit more nuanced in reality).
• boba7 5y ago
  Where are those millions of dead people in the streets? Something wrong with this simulation.
• Tepix 5y ago
  Neat! Is there an API for this game so we can try to achieve great results programmatically?
• pragmatick 5y ago
  I wish I could disable the notifications. Or can I?
• mattowen_uk 5y ago
  So, like many of us, I did nothing, and let the virus burn itself out, which it managed to do by July 2020. Approx 1% deaths. Which I think is acceptable, to allow 99% of the population to be able to return to a normal life so quickly. However, I'm not sure I understand the impact of the hospitals being over capacity? Does the model factor in extra deaths of people who can't get treated for non-Covid problems?
  • e12e 5y ago
    > Approx 1% deaths. Which I think is acceptable, to allow 99% of the population to be able to return to a normal life so quickly. That's 100 million people dead, globally? And higher than UK deaths during WW2? https://topforeignstocks.com/2016/04/19/chart-world-war-ii-casualties-as-a-percentage-of-each-countrys-population/ https://topforeignstocks.com/2016/04/19/chart-world-war-ii-c...
    • mattowen_uk 5y ago
      I have very low EQ, so yes, 100m globally (Actually 77.9m) vs 7.8 billion is totally acceptable (to me).
      • e12e 5y ago
        I'm not sure if "low EQ" is an explanation here - it would lead to indifference regarding deaths and "return to a normal life so quickly", no ? Or is "population" a proxy for "me"?
        • mattowen_uk 5y ago
          It's a stats thing, plus a factual thing. I personally don't care much about the wellbeing of others, but I do understand based on what I read, that for the majority of people, they don't like dying, lockdowns, or masks etc. So from that I can extrapolate that people want a 'return to a normal life quickly', as opposed to living with Covid over an extended time period. > Or is "population" à proxy for "me"? Absolutely not. I am totally fine with my splendid isolation. Most of the world could burn for all I care. The human race hasn't done me much favours in my life, so why should I care about people I don't even know? I also upvoted you, not because I like you, but because you took the time to engage in dialogue.
• reedf1 5y ago
  Seems like most people did nothing in the first wave - only to pat themselves on the back when the rates were low in the summer. You may have to wait till the winter in the simulation to see how well that strategy really works... funny how art imitates reality!
• zelphirkalt 5y ago
  There are many measures one can take missing and the actions one can take are too broad. Missing for example the measure of introducing tests for the population for usage of essential services. For example there could be separate options for various types of masks. There could be options for where to use masks. Then there could be measures for offices and so on. Some of the events seem time-scripted, to happen regardless of what you do, or I have been unlucky. Like I had all restrictions up, and something under 5k cases, bam! mutation pops up. A real government has waaay more ways to fight the pandemic. For example tracing of cases can be done, if there are few enough cases. Strict controls on quaranteen for returners from other countries. However, the game sends the message: "Could you have done better?" Perhaps not too wrong.
• johbjo 5y ago
  The reason this simulation is so inaccurate relative to reality, is that it's assuming the only basis for individuals' decisions are government policies. In the beginning everyone was searching for information, reading articles, and sharing experiences and listening to stories. It was the main topic of conversation for months. In places where the first wave hit hard, personal experiences were a much more credible source of information, and motivator of behaviour, than random edicts from officials. And the reason "hard" government policies are so problematic is that they shift responsibility for both actions and consequences from individuals to some faceless authority. What does a restaurant owner think after six months of lost livelihood, when they finally catch it and it feels like a cold? That's more responsibility than any random government official can bear, and why voluntary measures first is so important.
• collyw 5y ago
  It doesn't include time parameters, yet we have had curfews here as the virus spreads more after dark. It seems to make assumptions that are unproven, like reusing the same mask day after day (like the vast majority of the public do) makes some kind of improvement.