Covid-19 spread

For Teachers
1

How many CSP/BJC teachers out there are planning to customize U5L2: Disease Spread Project to simulate the spread of Covid-19? I haven't started tinkering yet, but some directions I'm thinking about which seem like they might be doable in Snap!:

  • 3 colors for uninfected, asymptomatic, symptomatic
  • 4th color for fatality?
  • 5th color for recovered/immune?
  • Age attribute (randomly sampled to match a demographic histogram), and variable fatality rate
  • Or since Age would just be a proxy for Vulnerability more generally, omit it and just have variable fataility rate?
  • Infection depends on duration of proximity?
  • Clones have constant/variable behavior in terms of motion/avoiding other clones (social distancing)
  • various statistics tracked in variables, can be shown or not
  • various statistics tracked with real-time graphs

Any other ideas out there?

2

6th color (or 3.5th color) for hospitalized? Colors could be like
blue: recovered/immune
green: uninfected
yellow: asymptomatic
orange: infected
red: hospitalized
black: fatality

3

As of yesterday, somebody was infected after having recovered earlier.

4

Wow. Yet another complication in reality that would require a decision whether to include in a model or not.

5

Well, I don't know about the model complexity issue but I think it's something kids should know. If they test positive and then test negative that doesn't mean they can start partying.

6

It's part of an important pedagogical point as well, that a model always differs somehow from reality, and you have to understand those differences and communicate them transparently to the decisionmakers or public that are consuming the analytical results of the model. And it's important to understand on the flipside, as a public consumer of analytic models as well.

7

Yup.