Resources from Our Team

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Here below is an animated simulation of infectious disease spread in a population. We begin our simulation with a population of 529 individuals, of which one is infected with a disease. As time progresses, we can watch how a single infection can grow into an epidemic. In the population, a grey face represents an individual who is susceptible to infection, and a red face represents an individual who is currently suffering from an infection. In this simulation, the infection lasts 5 days, after which there is a 98.5% chance that an infected individual will recover and be immune to further infection, represented by a green face, and a 1.5% chance that they will die, represented by a blue face. An infected individual will, at the start of an epidemic, infect 2 to 3 susceptible individuals on average. These parameters are a very rough approximation of the characteristics of the ancestral SARS-CoV-2 variant. We see that, at first, the virus spreads very slowly. However, once a critical mass of infections is attained, the disease spreads rapidly. We also see at the end that some individuals still have grey faces,  meaning they never contracted the disease. This is due to the phenomenon of “herd immunity”. As the number of individuals immune to infection grew in the population, it became difficult for the disease to spread to susceptible targets, and so it did not ultimately infect the entire population. -- Mir Henglin, 4/6/2020

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