Corona Simulator

Overview

This program attempts to model a live spread of COVID within a population while displaying the health status of each of the individuals: Healthy, infected, dead, recovered/immune. The program uses balls to represent people, a window boundary to represent a community, and linear motion to represent an individuals movement within the community. The simulation continues until the infection has disappeared from the population through killing the host and/or the host recovering. The program then will display a graph showing the health status data of the population over time.

How To Use Program

The scripts needed to run this program are ball.py and corona_simulator.py.

Upon initializing parameters in corona_simulator.py script, run the corona_simulator.py script to execute program. Follow steps below for details on where/how to initialize parameters

Initializing Parameters in corona_simulator.py Script

In the first few lines of this script, immediately after imports, you will find the five key adjustable parameters of this program which affect the size of the boundary, size of the sample population, and health status of sample population.

Initializing Size of the Boundary

Here, the width and height variables that are set affect the size of the pop up window boundary.

For best visuals, it's recommended to set the size smaller than the width and height of the screen it will be viewed on. Although, it will still behave functionally if the window exceeds size of the screen.

Increasing the area of the boundary typically decreases the rate of transmission

Initializing Size Sample Population

Here, the number of samples/balls is initialized.

Increasing the sample size typically increases the rate of transmission Increasing the sample size can be tolling on the CPU, decrease sample size if program runs too slowly

Initializing Health Status of Sample Population

The two variables here affect the initial percentage of the population that is infected and initial percentage of the population that is considered "at risk" meaning they have a greater chance of dying if infected.

Example: If we set initial population to num_balls=100, at risk population to at_risk_pop=.5, and infected population to infected_pop to .2 Total Population: 100

• Percentage of Healthy Population: 80% (80 samples)
• Percentage of Infected Population: 20% (20 samples)
• Percentage of At Risk Population: 50% (50 samples) Note that the "at risk" population can be in either the healthy or infected categories or both See Further Customizations for algorithm details on initializing health statuses

Increasing the infected sample size typically increases the rate of transmission Increasing the At Risk sample size typically increases the total number of deaths

Optional Parameter (waitkey)

Also contain in the corona_simulator.py script a few lines below where initial parameters are given within the while loop, while bh.survivors() == True, the waitkey can be edited to change the speed of the simulation (how fast the balls move).

Increasing the value of the waitkey will decrease the speed of the simulation (speed of balls)

Further Customizations

Future Improvement Ideas