Simulitis (A Coronavirus Simulation)

MATLAB code to replicate Washington Post's Coronavirus simulation
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Updated Sat, 11 Apr 2020 14:58:18 +0000

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I'm sure by now you've all seen the Washington Post article with the COVID-19 simulation, speaking to the public health benefits of social isolation in the face of a highly infectious disease. If you haven't, here's the article: https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/world/corona-simulator/

Well, out of my quarantine boredom, I recreated this simulation in MATLAB, with more knobs to turn and parameters to play around with. For example, what if some of the carriers can die? What if the disease is Ebola instead (~50% mortality rate)?

This function simulates disease transmission among a set of n carriers, in a confined space, with some proportion of carriers socially isolating themselves. A simple multibody physics model (elastic collision between two equal-mass particles) determines carrier trajectory.

Hopefully this gives you a fun (albeit brief) respite from the doldrums of social isolation!

Cite As

Joshua Gafford (2024). Simulitis (A Coronavirus Simulation) (https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/74610-simulitis-a-coronavirus-simulation), MATLAB Central File Exchange. Retrieved .

MATLAB Release Compatibility
Created with R2018b
Compatible with R2018b and later releases
Platform Compatibility
Windows macOS Linux

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Version Published Release Notes
1.1.2

Fixed an issue with initial conditions and wall behavior

1.1.1

Fixed an issue where the quarantine walls would stop opening

1.1.0

Added horizontal wall for four-quadrant quarantine simulation

1.0.9

Fixed a typo

1.0.8

Added ability to stop quarantine gate from fully opening.

1.0.7

Removed unnecessary refreshdata calls to speed up execution.

1.0.6

Modified simulation so only carriers behind quarantine wall can be initially infected.

1.0.5

Corrected input parsing for quarantine gate functionality

1.0.4

Added quarantine functionality.

1.0.3

Updated Tags

1.0.2

Fixed an issue with vector size inconsistencies and improved parameter checking

1.0.1

Removed commented-out code

1.0.0